It’s no accident that my cover for 1999 has a nuclear explosion on it.
The plot is about a year that repeats over and over. I started with the central idea of so many time loop movies, but I asked, “What if the time loop was for a whole year instead of just a day?” I also wondered, “What if everyone knew they were in a time loop? And not just the one or two main characters?”
The more I played out the scenarios in my head, the uglier it got. Hence, the bomb right there on the cover.
Our collective experience of COVID featured heavily in this too. I was writing about some big fears, and how close we are to things falling apart in a “tick tick BOOM” style (sorry Lin Manuel Miranda).
At the same time, I am fundamentally an optimist. And that hope is in the book (among other things, it’s a love story of sorts).
I do think, even though things are really terrible right now, there are good reasons for optimism.
Take one case study. Imagine traveling back in time to 1992, New York. And tell a resident of the city what’s coming over the next thirty years.
First, the city will be hit by the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which was a big deal but we don’t talk about it as much because of the 9/11 attacks, which were of course a much bigger tragedy. After that were some total blackouts of the city, at least two massive hurricanes that inundate the city, and then in the spring of 2020, the significant international travel through its airports and high usage of mass transit resulted in the COVID pandemic hitting the city catastrophically…
Ask that person in 1992 what New York would feel like after all that and they’d probably guess that New York had descended into a Max Mad sort of hellhole. And yet the opposite happened. There wasn’t widespread looting during any of those crises. The shared sense of what it means to be a New Yorker increased, and made the sense of interconnectedness stronger. The city became more resilient.
So I do have hope. Even as I Doomscroll through my Twitter timeline, I can still find that hope (though usually I have to get off of Twitter to find it again).
When the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists met in January to decide whether to move the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight, they didn’t. It’s still stuck there, at 100 seconds to midnight. I don’t know if we’re closer to midnight now than we were a month ago. But the clock isn’t at zero seconds either. That’s something.
Until next time,
Erik
1999: A Novella
What if the year 1999 repeated… forever?
Will’s first time through 1999 was a pretty good year. And the second time was even better. But as the year continues to repeat, and as the world realizes that they might be trapped in 1999 forever, Earth’s civilizations start to unravel.
What is causing the time loop? Why is the world stuck in 1999? Is it the Y2K bug? Or something else entirely?
When Will discovers the shocking truth causing the global disaster—and his own unwitting role in it—he will be asked to give up everything in order to save the world and get humanity back on track to the year 2000.
It’s available as an ebook on Amazon, Kobo, Apple, B&N, Google, and in audiobook on Chirp, Audible, and Youtube.