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editorial

If truth is stranger than fiction – and in the year 2018, who would argue otherwise? – there has to be a moment when the baton is passed: when fiction says to a suddenly surreal real world, “This is getting too freaky for me. I’m handing things off.”

Last week may have been just such a moment. At a time when world events look to have escaped from the pages of a Marvel comic or the frames of a particularly creepy Stanley Kubrick film, two of the prime movers behind those documents of dystopian fantasy passed from this mortal world.

Stan Lee, inventor of such Marvel Comics characters as Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, was 95. His heroes minted his success: Generations of kids identified with, and shelled out for, merch and movies about Black Panther, Thor, the Human Torch and Iron Man.

Alas, today’s crop of world leaders seems to have drawn inspiration from Mr. Lee’s villains instead. It would not be hard to cast a real-life Kingpin, the glowering, crooked New York business magnate with a dandyish streak and an inferiority complex.

The passing of Douglas Rain was just as notable for those with the eerie sense that the cosmos is trying to tell us something. The Canadian actor made his creative mark doing Shakespeare at Ontario’s Stratford Festival, but he was best known for voicing “Hal,” the evil talking computer from Mr. Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In the film, the HAL 9000 unit rebels against the humans it is supposed to be shepherding to Jupiter, murdering astronaut Frank Poole and three other crew members. In our own earthbound odyssey, it is algorithms spreading social-media disinformation, the consequences of which make the fate of Frank Poole look quaint. Meanwhile, one reads occasional reports of Amazon’s voice-assistant Alexa bursting into spontaneous laughter….

In Mr. Lee’s comic books, Spider-Man always beats Kingpin in the end. In 2001, the sole surviving astronaut disables Mr. Rain’s HAL before he can do any more damage. All the more reason to wish those men had not departed when they did. We could use a couple of fresh happy endings.

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