Current Events Are Killing My Novel

Time Keeps on Slipping into the Future…

I swear I renamed it to the Gulf of Texas before he did!

In between bouts of ripping my hair out over the current state of the nation and the world, I have a far more personal, selfish, and ridiculous reason for distress: our stupid timeline is outstripping the events of the science fiction novel I’ve been working on for the last 8 years.

My upcoming novel, Light Shines Through, is part of a trilogy I have been pouring my heart into for what feels like forever; an idea that came to me more than 8 years ago, that at the time seemed far-fetched.

The novel is set in 2042, with point-of-view characters from several of the “new” nations of North America that arose after the Second Civil War and the ensuing Greater Depression that wrecked the global economy.

My book isn’t about the Second Civil War per se, but the devastation, bloodshed, and nightmare fuel of that war is pervasive in the background of my characters as they try to rebuild the world after nearly two decades of chaos, death, and poverty.

I got so deep into worldbuilding for this epic that I spent hours creating maps and flags to ground myself in the reality that these stories would live in, including my Nations of North America, 2042 map, above. It was important to me to think about the destruction, the mass migration, the greed and stupidity that would result from a phase as cliched as “Second Civil War”.

Here’s a snippet from one of the early chapters:

“Eighteen years later, there are still very few things people agree on regarding the Flash.

Everyone but the most extreme whackos agree that at 3:17am, on the morning of Friday, the 15th of November, 2024, ten days after the most widely disputed election in American history, a nuclear device detonated in Washington, DC, wiping out most of the United States government.

Virtually everyone agrees that it must have been in the range of 800 kilotons to one megaton.

After that, it all starts to become debateable.

Although hundreds of groups ultimately claimed responsibility for it, there is no official consensus on who actually did it. Debates range from the obvious, like ISIS, or al-Quaeda, or Russia, or China, into the more improbable, like Mossad, or Canada, or a failed US military coup. Then come the downright ridiculous: the Freemasons and the Rothschilds, or Black Lives Matter, or the Sons of the Confederacy, or the lizard people living amongst us.

A fringe popular idea that has gained ground on the fractured remnants of the internet over the years is that the bomb was the result of an alternate universe test scenario, carried out by the superusers who control virtual reality, just to see what would happen, the theory goes. Rejoice, simulated humans! Alternate timelines exist in which the United States is still whole, and happy, and free. Or as close to those things as it ever really was.

Everyone has a pet theory, and after almost twenty years it’s become a bit of a cultural rubric to ask at bars or parties. What sign are you? Do you believe in the afterlife? What’s your theory about the Flash? resolves into Wait, you’re a Pisces who believes in reincarnation and thinks it was aliens testing us to see if we were ready to join the Galactic Alliance? Goodbye forever!

Secret reports put together by every remaining world intelligence agency might have more definitive answers. The reports that got released to the public were anything but.

The human mind hates a mystery, and will happily create a story to fill in the blank spaces surrounding an event, especially one of this magnitude. Into the void created by the absence of concrete data, an infinite multitude of possibilities can bloom, lotuslike, endlessly repeating and still never the same. And all of these, whispered in secret to lovers, debated about over poor coffee substitutes, argued over in the food line, fought about on the battlefield, screamed about in lonely despair, the only thing that remains 100% true is that the Flash — the event itself, the refugee crisis, the market crashes and wars that resulted — the Flash changed the course of human history forever.

Yep. In my book, the igniting event is a catastrophically bad Presidential Election in 2024, disputed and then rendered meaningless by a rogue nuclear attack on D.C. as nearly all leaders are gathered in Washington for talks on how to resolve the crisis.

In the stupid timeline we’re living in now, we thankfully didn’t have the nuke attack I envisioned in my book. And, I’ll admit, I also didn’t anticipate Elon Musk. But the 2024 election was catastrophically bad, and the results we’re living through every day make me feel like I’m somehow predicting the future. Some small part of me feels vindicated, in a messed up way. I always knew it could get this bad, even if I didn’t want it to.

But I’m telling you, and pardon my Afrikaans here, it is fucking my shit up that current events are outpacing the book I’ve been writing for nearly a decade.

I know I’ll get complaints here, from any number of angles. No one could get away with sneaking a nuke into Washington! Yes, but this is called fiction, see. Why did you have to recreate the Confederacy?! Ask yourself this: if those states were suddenly independent of the rest of us, what do YOU think they’d call themselves? Cascadia could never take that much territory in real life! Again, I’m writing fiction, and in my story, they could and they did. Why are Texas and the Confederacy fighting over Cuba?? Just…just read the book when it comes out, man. I swear I’ve got reasons for everything on the map.

I would, however, like to note two things:

• I liberated Greenland (sorry, Kalaallit Nunaat) long before he tried to buy it.

• I renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of Texas before Google sold us all out for a dollar.

I know that in the face of the constitutional crises we are currently facing, and this simmering Cold Civil War, my distress as a writer is somewhere far down the list in billionth place.

Nonetheless, I’m here. I’m writing. I am still working on my book, which is ultimately about hope, and how science can help rebuild a shattered world. I am still trying to find time to sit quietly and let the muse speak to me.

And I bet I’m not alone! Have you had visions of a terrifying future that are now coming to life? I want to hear from you.

Please like, share, and comment if you are an artist of any kind who is trying to stay creative and productive during this, the absolute dumbest and shittiest of all of the timelines available in the infinite multiverse.