Not what the author intended

[redbird]

I'm rereading Ken MacLeod's The Cassini Division, which was published in 1998, and the viewpoint character/narrator at one point (this is fairly early in the book) describes a defense built by her organization as "our Berlin Wall, our Guantanamo (Earth history. Look it up. There are files.)"

Reading that in 2005, Guantanamo has very different meaning and resonance than it did when MacLeod wrote those lines, or when I first read the book, shortly after it was published.