Never finished, just abandoned

When I used to read paperback sci-fi of the sort that doesn’t exist anymore, back during my teens, there was always something glaringly obvious missing in stories set in the late 20th or 21st century if they were written between the postwar years and the (then) present – not that we knew it yet.

Sure they had handheld computers and instant voice communications between objects light years apart, but nobody back then predicted or imagined that the system the US military built to decentralise command and control during a nuclear war would come to dominate every aspect of our lives.

I sometimes wonder if those immortal writers like Matheson, Dick or Bradbury (if they were still around) ever wish they could go back in time and write books set today again, knowing what they know about the world now, or even make updated versions where the future they were depicting has the internet in it.

Most likely they’d just give us the most insightful critiques and ideas about the internet’s existence we’ll ever have, but the question above is one I’m struggling with lately, especially now we’re a few years out of the worst of the COVID pandemic.

In the first draft of Falling, started in the early 1990s, the tragic collapse of the Sydney Harbour Bridge occurred in October 1998, the story taking place in 2017. In 1991 when I started it, both dates were in the far off future.

When the date and time of the momentous event actually arrived in the real world, I was sitting in my car before starting a shift at a video store, kind of depressed that appointed time on such a red letter day in the history of literature came and went unnoticed.

I rewrote Falling once in the early 2000s, moving the dates 15 years or so hence, then again in a major overhaul that took place between 2013 and 2019, the version you can hold in your very own hands right now by clicking here.

The new date I settled upon for the disaster was October 2018, and the story proper would now begin in the first few days of 2037.

That meant I had a deadline. For it to become a global literary phenomenon and Netflix or Amazon to want to make a ten part event series out of it, it had to release before the date of the bridge collapse itself.

Obviously if it didn’t it wouldn’t detract from the story, but as Hollywood well knows, there are few better marketing angles than releasing a movie containing the depiction of something with terrifying or profound global ramifications just a few months before it’s supposed to occur.

Anyway, I’m in good company – the same thing in Falling that I’m going to describe below happened to Marvel Studios too. After Thanos snapped his fingers and wiped out half the population of the universe in 2017, the story of Avengers: Endgame picks up in 2022 with the survivors trying to get on with their lives, the world seemingly deserted after the shock.

With the benefit of hindsight, we all know what the world was like in 2022 (actually it did look pretty deserted), but it rendered the depiction if the world in the movie completely inaccurate.

It didn’t matter, of course, because by the time we arrived at the time the movie was set, the movie itself was long gone and we’d all enjoyed it at the time. Knowing the actual science behind a moon landing since July 1969 has never detracted from the charm of by Georges Méliès’ Le voyage dans la lune, after all – it doesn’t matter if it was accurate to the period.

In the same way, Falling is now a figment of history where anachronisms about the then-future have been and gone. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that after the bridge collapses/collapsed in 2018, the new one is/was built throughout 2019 and finished in 2020. And since that time is now behind us and we know what was happening in the world, we know it was probably impossible to design, engineer and build a major city thoroughfare at a time like that.

At a pinch I could make it canon that the bridge was built and completed by the end of 2019 because the proverbial didn’t hit the fan until early 2020 for most of us, but the story is still kind of lacking by not even mentioning the biggest upheaval in society and the economy in half a century.

So the conundrum now is; do I rewrite Falling to talk about the effects of COVID, as every fictional story set in or around the early 2020s must if it deals with global issues? If I don’t, it is making it too obvious I wrote it before COVID hit and I’m just hoping you can suspend disbelief that far, maybe accepting that the whole thing actually takes place in a parallel universe where COVID never existed?

If I do rewrite it, what should the rewrite even contain? If I figure out the destruction of the old bridge and the creation of the new bridge didn’t need to be affected by it all, will anything I say about it just be glaring proof I’m trying to be contemporary but don’t really need any comment?

If I move Falling even further forward it time to avoid this whole temporal quandary, some of the technologies I depict in the year 2037 will already be obsolete. Many of them are now, thanks to advances none of us had considered in the early 1990s like AI and bioengineering.

Thankfully it’s an ebook, so I can change whatever I want with a minimum of fuss and no cost. But is that crossing an invisible barrier in my mind, one that considered that I’d laboured over this baby for 30 years and released it into the world to make its own way, no longer my property but owned by the perpetuity of artistic history, whether it’s made an impact or not?

Is it, as many directors, writers and other artists have said when faced with a release date, simply abandoned rather than finished? And if so, in the age where we can endlessly digitally remix media, never actually finished at all?