The very next day after the most allergic Saint George's Day, when even pharmacies made a fortune thanks to the sale of antihistamines and throat lozenges, Com si fos ahir offered us a surprising sequence. A kind of prophecy like Nostradamus's, which enshrines the series' screenwriters in the Olympus of the most opportune predictors and seers. It's about a scene in which Ivan (Roger Coma) walks through a park with Kilian (Albert Prat), an expert gardener with whom he is starting a relationship. They are getting to know each other, and Kilian is illustrating him on arboriculture in this phase of seducing each other and sharing their passions. He explains: “The quintessential Barcelona tree is the plane tree. In the sixties, they didn't know how to plant anything else. The grace is that they grow very quickly and provide a lot of shade, but they also make a lot of mess. The leaves, those little balls that people quite dislike... In fact, in some cities they are already starting to replace them because they cause a lot of allergies.” We can attest to that. Months before this Saint George's Day so saturated with particles, the screenwriters anticipated the news. And fate has made a filler dialogue, which only served to slightly prolong the conflict, has ended up grabbing our attention due to its link with the most immediate current events. Barcelona's plane trees were one of the protagonists of the day and were being talked about in news programs and magazines. Perhaps what some experts dared not say for fear of angering environmentalists was warned to us in the midday series: that in other cities around the world they have already been replaced by less irritating species. It's good to know.And in this context of prophecies amidst books and legends, it is appropriate to recommend the documentary The War of the Worlds: A Prophetic Novel, which you can find on Movistar+. It makes sense that, at a time of disillusionment and great international conflict, the novel that disturbed the world and revolutionized literature should emerge. The documentary analyzes it through multiple expert voices: writers, biographers, historians, essayists, researchers, NASA professors, and science experts, who demonstrate how the story of the Martian invasion has connected with the fears of different generations. It takes a look at the past to understand the social context that motivated H.G. Wells to write the novel between 1895 and 1897, but it uses images from the present to connect with current events. “No one would have believed in the advancement of that uneasy human world that, for all its progress in physical science, remained so preposterously ignorant of the possibility of the invasion of the earth by intelligences from Mars. [...] With the same placidity the human race went about its terrestrial occupations, cherishing its delusions of dominion over matter.” The documentary lists the enemies that have been symbolically intuited behind these invading Martians and how art, cinema, illustration, comics, and literature have adapted The War of the Worlds to speak to us of the dangers of each era. Without a doubt, a good time to delve deeper into it.

I don't know if the world is a horrible place, but we humans make it one. Being a pessimist by nature, I tend to believe that whatever good we can do hardly compensates for the harm others do. I don't think Mother Teresa of Calcutta makes up for Hitler, for crying out loud. We should be constantly apologizing to our children.

The last time that Joe Abercrombie (Lancaster, 1974) visited Barcelona, just two weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic confined half the world to its home. Perhaps due to the pre-apocalyptic atmosphere he sensed in his new novel. The devils (Alianza, 2025; translated into Spanish by Manu Viciano) the Catalan capital is enigmatically mentioned: it is a place where something terrible and at the same time indeterminate has happened. The British author, who for more than a decade has been one of the most prominent references in the fantasy genre, presents in the book his most over-the-top story, starring a peculiar expedition, made up of a monk and several supernatural creatures such as a vampire, a werewolf, an elf and a necromancer. Their mission is to accompany Alex, young heir to the Serpent Throne, from southern Europe to Troy, which Abercrombie imagines as the capital of the East.