Rule No. 1

In the months after 9/11, critically-acclaimed satirist Rupert Morgan wrote a comic novel predicting what would happen next: 'Rule No. 1', the third in his trilogy of satires set in an allegorical version of the west named Atlantis.His British publishers were too nervous to publish a satirical look at the War on Terror at a time when the subject was very sensitive and so sat on the book for two years. His French publisher told him 'If we publish this novel, not only will your career be finished, but so will mine'. Indeed, the only country that dared publish it at the time was Croatia, where the memory of the horrors of war were still fresh and the book was a best-seller.It eventually appeared in Britain and other English-speaking countries with a minimum of publicity long after the sequence of events the novel predicted had come true. Rupert Morgan did not write again for the next ten years.