If you could rewrite any book’s ending, which one would you choose?
Most endings are earned by everything that’s gone before. Change the last chapter and, sooner or later, you’ll find yourself rewriting the first.
That said, I’d happily add another 500 pages to Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love.
It’s the story of Lazarus Long, a man who has lived for more than 2,000 years and is, frankly, bored with immortality. By the end, he finds new reasons to carry on, helped by his incredibly intelligent computer companion, Minerva, who is eventually given a human body. It made perfect sense when Heinlein wrote it.
But we’re no longer living in the 1970s.
I’d leave everything exactly as it is until the final few chapters, then reverse the idea. Instead of the computer becoming human, I’d have Lazarus upload himself into the computer.
Now that’s a sequel I’d want to read.
After experiencing almost everything possible in a physical body over two millennia, he’d finally step into something genuinely new: life without one. How would you see without eyes, hear without ears, or touch without skin? Could you experience thousands of lives at once? Would consciousness become richer… or unbearably lonely? And if you could experience almost everything, would anything still feel special?
For me, that’s where the story really begins. Heinlein asked what happens when someone lives for 2,000 years. I’d love to know what happens when they stop being human altogether.
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