From Death Masks: I went down to a nearby diner for breakfast, and asked the waitress to turn on the news. She did.

"… extraordinary event reminiscent of the science-fiction horror stories around the turn of the millennium, what appeared to be an asteroid fell from space and impacted just outside the village of Casaverde in Honduras." The screen flickered to an aerial shot of an enormous, smoking hole in the ground, and a half-mile-wide circle of trees that had been blasted flat

I noticed this during a recent rereading, and I wander if it means something. Death Masks was published 2003, and by my account that is still the turn of the millennium, so how can this event (the fall of the satelite) be reminiscent to some stories written during the same time (probably refers to "Armageddon" , "Deep impact" and similar). Reminiscent in my understanding means remembering something that happened in the past, and not that recently too. So that means that the time in the book is at least a few years ahead of real time. Am I wrong?