Nupdate!
by wjw on February 7, 2013
No updates here! Nupdate!
It’s rare that a post of mine generates such unanimity, but it looks as if the question I asked in my last post has been answered.
The Rift will therefore hit the net unaltered, except for the usual tweaks and small improvements. People reading the novel will experience an alternative universe rather more pleasant than the one we live in now, where Katrina and Fukushima and 9/11 never happened.
We, as a culture, have learned the lesson that a merciless world can kill us at any time. People in The Rift learn this in the course of the novel, but they start out in a more innocent place than the one we live in now.
I very much liked y’all’s suggestion of a preface placing the work in its time. When I was living in the Nineties it hardly seemed a more innocuoust time, but it certainly seems that way now.
I’ve come to think of science fiction and thrillers written in the past like the Rift, which are not updated, as sliding into the alternate history category, or gaining that as a tag or a keyword.
Now that you have made your decision, I think, I am changing my vote. Leave no letter unchanged. The quake was caused by time traveling aliens who created an alternate universe.
The scariest thing about ‘The Rift’ is that you wrote it 15 years ago! Surely, I thought, it was only about five … then I checked my copy … oh dear! Don’t change it, by the way.
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