Rosa Ribas: Trump's chaotic world is the worst thing for science fiction writers.

Spanish writer Rosa Ribas , one of the leading figures in the crime genre in Spain, who has just published the novel Los viejos amores , believes that the chaotic and unpredictable world created by Donald Trump "is conducive to crime novels and the worst news for science fiction authors."

In an interview, Ribas points out that "if some writers are doing badly now with Trump, it's the science fiction writers, because we're living in something so dystopian that it's impossible for them to invent anything worse ."

The author of The Painter of Flanders is clear that, as a novel, Trump's story has "too many twists and turns, and they happen very quickly, which is narratively disastrous," and adds that the reader of this hypothetical novel "doesn't know if he's a very bad guy, who has a secret plan that we haven't yet figured out, or if he's the puppet of the very bad guy, like in the James Bond movies."

Regarding her new novel, Ribas draws inspiration from these cases of women who fell victim to "love scammers," with the most dramatic case of two sisters who were murdered after being fleeced by the scammers for years as the starting point.

" That case impressed me greatly, because it always happens that everyone laughs at the victim saying 'how could she have been so stupid?', but in reality it reflects the fact that these women are very alone, sometimes also very helpless, but in reality those two sisters were not two ignorant ladies, they were retired school teachers."

The writer herself was the target of an attempted love scam: "He told me that when he saw a photo of me, he thought I was a messenger from God because it reminded him of his deceased wife, and that catches you at a vulnerable moment in your life and you can fall," she notes.

Los viejos amores (Tusquets) is a new investigation for the Hernández detectives , the fourth novel in the series that has the family of investigators as protagonists.

In this new chapter , five years have passed since Marc, the son of the family , died in the third installment of the series, Our Dead (2023), and each of its members deals with the loss "in their own way."

Regarding her other crime saga, Ribas is not currently planning to finish the fifth and final installment of her iconic Spanish-German police novel Cornelia Weber Tejedor , for which she has "a notebook full of notes."

For the time being, he will continue to "alternate between a Hernández novel and others, not necessarily crime novels."