Carlos Hernández has experienced almost everything as a journalist. He covered parliamentary information for years, the war in Kosovo, the war in Afghanistan, the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, he was a direct witness to the murder of journalist José Couso in Baghdad by US troops and, in recent years, he has carried out investigations into the repression of Francoism and the republican victims of the Spanish dictatorship and Nazism, materialized in three excellent books: The last Spaniards of Mauthausen, Franco’s concentration camps and Deported 4443, the latter a comic illustrated by Ioannes Ensis. In addition, he is a regular contributor to elDiario.es.
Hernández has been on the front line of some of the most important events of recent decades. The future is one of the few things that remained to be covered. There is no way to do it for a journalist today, unless he has a source of information capable of sending him data from the year 2149. And that is what has happened to him. Or what you have imagined. Or, perhaps, both.
In a unique novel, so unique that “it is not a novel”, a warning message is launched from the future, written around the year 2149 by Anne Watts and sent by email to Carlos Hernández, who claims to have received it in 2024 and exercise as a simple messenger, transferring it to us in the form of a book. Its title, Believe me. It is not a novel. It’s your future. That’s it available in several platforms and on January 1 it will hit bookstores.
Your future
On that date, the middle of the 22nd century, 15% of the population has been implanted with a microprocessor that allows them to integrate their brain into the Internet. Official statistics indicate that 99.9% of them have not only increased their work performance, but they report feeling much happier in their daily lives. People believe they are free, but things are not as the official narrative of the future tells them.
Deep down, we all know that democracies are going to shit, but maybe we need someone to tell us ‘from the future’ to be really aware
Carlos Hernandez
— Journalist and writer
Anne is a well-known journalist, television news presenter, with ethics and a sense of social responsibility. She lives upset by some of the same concerns that affect Carlos Hernández in real life, about the challenges and obstacles of journalism. She feels that “true journalism died more than a century ago,” when facts were still reported and analyzed as if “history books were written.” Anne admires that “journalism in its purest form,” like that practiced by “the colleagues who covered the wars that took place in those centuries.”
In 2149 the leaders operate in the shadows, and one of their great achievements has been to rewrite History, to erase real information and collective memory, essential tools for journalism and knowledge, instruments with which Watts and Hernández have worked all his life. A poorly informed society without historical memory is easily manipulated.
If you know they can do it, why do you think they won’t?
Anne Watts
— Presenter and author of ‘Créeme’, written in 2149
Carlos Hernández has investigated this throughout his career, and now he does so, with the help of Watts, in the future time, convinced that the long letter that she sends him from 2149, with the appearance of a dystopia, can end ” being a realistic prediction of what is to come,” as he explains to elDiario.es.
Hernández believes in Anne Watts’ story, and that is why she has published “this non-novel”, in which “everything she tells is as terrible as it is feasible.” Like good journalists, both are concerned with defending the facts against hoaxes and lies, in two contexts, our present and the year 2149, marked by numerous risks. “We have normalized that, survey after survey, there are more and more citizens who would not mind living in a dictatorship. We have assumed hatred, insults and the tsunami of hoaxes as something inevitable that increasingly prevents us from distinguishing lies from truth,” he reflects in conversation with this medium.
The history of the future in Believe me It forces us to think about the challenges of the present regarding the limits of our privacy, social networks, the ability of technology companies to know our location, our tastes, vices, virtues and also our ideology with all its nuances.
“We want to think, because it is the most comfortable thing, that all that information and technological power will never be used to do evil; It will never be used against us. Maybe not today, but what about tomorrow? What would happen if that almost infinite power were controlled by a tyrannical regime? Anne Watts answers that question in detail and what she tells is more than disturbing,” says Hernández.
Believe me It is a continuation of his work on historical memory. In his previous books the author investigated our recent past, that of Spain and Europe. Now it delves into a future in which the past has been erased or manipulated so that people do not know the magnitude of the tyranny in which they live, nor the dramatic and violent path that led to it.
Once again, the importance of memory and truth form the backbone of Hernández’s story, which invites us to reflect on the challenges and obstacles of our times. “Deep down, we all know that democracies are going to shit, but maybe we need someone to tell us “from the future” to be really aware of what is to come if we don’t avoid it,” warns the author.
Throughout his career Hernández has worked to transmit the facts and historical memory of our present; now investigate them in the future
Believe me It also invites us to reflect on the misuse that can be made of technology, on who controls the controller. A key phrase in Anne Watts’ story sums it up like this: “If you know they can do it, why do you think they won’t?” The book has its own website (Noesunanovela.com) and already has promotion on social networks through a video in which Watts speaks to society about our present.
Watts is a smart, skilled journalist with a sense of smell, willing to do anything to unravel the facts and rescue buried memory. Those of us who know or have worked with Hernández in high-risk situations, under shells and bombs, know that he can be trusted, that he will do anything to tell what is happening, to denounce injustice, to protect his colleagues. It is likely that, for this reason, Watts chose him as the recipient of his shipment from the year 2149, knowing that he would not hesitate to understand and divulge it. I, like her, would have chosen him too.
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