Is the fast publication of the book 'Fire and Fury: The Story of the 2023 Maui Fire and Its Implications for Climate Change' proof that it was written before the wildfires started, and that the fires must have been planned to reduce the population? No, that's not true: The author's background indicates that this is rather a work of fiction. The book seems to be based on general information that was already publicly available at the time of publication.
The claim appeared in this video (archived here) posted on TikTok on August 17, 2023, with the following graphic overlay, translated by Lead Stories' staff:
Can you research and write a book in 4 days?
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Aug 23 10:37:29 2023 UTC)
The "4 days" claim is based on the TikToker's assumption that the book must have been published at least on August 13 because the first Amazon review was posted one day later. But the 44-page Kindle book's description showed the publication date of August 10 2023, the fire started on August 8. On August 10 the fires were not yet fully contained.
The Amazon link to the book is not live anymore, but an archived version of the page can be seen here.
The Tiktoker says in Romanian, translated by Lead Stories' staff, that a few days would be too short to write a book, even for artificial intelligence:
Yes, AI would indeed write the book in 20 minutes, but it needs information, there is still no information, we don't know exactly how many are dead, how [the fire] started, what the cause was.
He adds that this book would show that the globalists "are taking us for fools" and that:
they are telling us each time they show up on TV or at the World Economic Forum that we are too many, [so] they want to reduce the population.
The book's author, Miles Stones, has a fictitious-sounding name and does not have a history online to speak of wildfires. His biography on Amazon only says "I'd rather not say." It showed 18 other books that were published within a four-month period, according to a Lead Stories article published on August 17 2023. As of August 23, his page shows only three titles.
There is no evidence that the author had any special inside knowledge about the Maui fires. As PolitiFact notes, the details in the book's online summary and introduction appear to be drawn from information that had already been reported by the media and the Maui officials and that was already available online, which would make it easy for AI chatbots to make use of it.
There is no proof the book was written before the wildfires.
Lead Stories has debunked other posts about the Maui wildfires, including the ones that falsely suggested the fires were intentionally ignited.
