Dodging pop culture

There’s something particular about Falling that evolved over time but which, after I realised I was doing it, I pursued a bit more consciously.

It sounds almost silly to say it, especially because it’s quite plainly set in the year 2037, but I wanted it to have a timeless quality. And that meant treating references to things outside the world of the story very carefully.

The first expression of it was depictions of technology. Even though technology has a quite specific place in the story – it’s about people using technology to investigate the paranormal, after all – I didn’t want it to date Falling as an artistic artifact.

We all remember the number of otherwise great movies and books we’ve loved but which contain just one depiction of machinery that hopelessly anchors everything else to an era, whether it’s computers with big spinning magnetic tape drives or mobile phones you flip open to answer.

So in order to avoid planting a flag in an era you’d never be able to forget, I took a bit of a hands-off approach to the nuts and bolts.

The characters still use mobile phones and the internet – few of us can imagine a world 14 years hence without it, unless we’re writing a zombie apocalypse story.

But I was careful not to mention a social media network or online service from the real world – ask anyone who wrote a novel in 2004 and thought MySpace would conquer the world how it worked for them. In fact I barely even mention the finer points of what characters do with technology.

One story point between Vicki and Dale has them downloading a chat app on their devices, but telling you very basically how it worked was as far as I wanted to go. In a sequence describing what mobile phones have evolved into which I’ve talked about before, I take pains to only talk about overarching features and capabilities, not brand names, operating systems, apps or form factors.

I didn’t even want to be as specific as referencing email or SMS in case we don’t really do that in 2037 (or even if we do). Instead, I came up with a kind of generic online communication clearinghouse which processes a message you issue to someone, bots in the background figuring out how best to deliver it to them.

James Cameron once said about Titanic that he didn’t want to highlight the quaint differences in social mores between people on the doomed liner in 1912 and those of us who live now, he wanted to acknowledge our shared humanity. I kind of wanted to do the same thing with Falling and take a much longer view.

I once had an argument/discussion with a critique partner who said that it represented a change that people would sit on trains going to work reading books or newspapers years before, and today (this conversation happened in about 2010) all you see are people with white headphones plugged into tiny hard drives.

I disagreed. I actually believed it was an example of how things were the same. People still got trains to work and they still had to pass the time and entertain themselves, it was just the technology in their hands that changed.

So I took a similar tack to technology when I referenced culture outside the story, and if you’ve read Falling and took enough notice you’ll spot two pop culture references, even though (for the reasons above) I didn’t name them. I didn’t want to call attention to when the story was set or when the characters had experienced the movies or TV I was talking about so I was as oblique as I could be about them.

The first is when a soldier and a scientist are stationed on top of one of the cable car gondolas doing research/security following one of the most visible and frightening appearances of the supernatural centred around the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

The soldier (a young man) sees figures swirling in an eerie light that envelops the air around them. The figures look exactly like those he saw in a movie where they open some ancient relic and ghostly forms emerge to wheel and drift around in the air. One eventually stops in front of the characters and its face turns from that of a comely young woman to a deathly, hissing skull.

The three characters who witness it die horrible deaths, one in particular whose entire face melts off. The scene, of course, is the opening of the Ark of the Covenant from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

But there’s an even more deeply buried reference, and I was so mindful of not identifying it directly I threw a red herring into the mix about it.

It concerns Donald, the metallurgist working with the gang on the scientific effects the phenomena exert on the bridge. At certain points the story brings up a bit of a childhood phobia he has about a werewolf from an old movie.

As with other characters, the phenomena seems to dredge up horrors that are particular to Donald as an individual, so as an adult it’s all stuff he probably never thinks about… except when it starts howling and bashing against the door of the research van to get at him.

I gave the werewolf a fake origin story, a movie called The Curse of Blackwoods Manor, but it was the howl that came from entertainment in real life.

The sound effect John Landis used for the creature’s howl in An American Werewolf in London haunted my dreams when I saw it (way too young). For some reason I always thought it sounded like it was full of metal, so when I described it ringing out from far away in a couple of Donald’s nightmarish visions, it made my skin crawl as I wrote it.

Hopefully even those few outside references give Falling the timeless quality I went for, and it’ll be as fresh when people still read it in 2037 as it is for those who read it today.

Of course, it’s a moot point because nobody’s read it anyway, but still…