Note: If you are not interested in the backstory but just want to read the story you can find a cleaned PDF version here.

Mishra, P., & Narasimhan, A. (1987, August). And we all fall down. Science Today.

Back in 1986, Anand Narasimhan and I wrote a short story titled “We all fall down,” that was published the popular-science magazine Science Today. Science Today, edited by Mukul Sharma who wrote science fiction himself, was maybe the only outlet where you could publish science fiction. Anyway, the story was published in the August 1987 issue of the magazine.

I had forgotten about it completely but I know I had scanned it years ago – so I wouldn’t have to hang on to the paper version. Of course I didn’t have a clue as to where the pdf was, what I had named it etc. etc. An hour or so of digging around on my computer I did locate it… reading through it after so many years was kinda fun. And then I discovered something interesting.

Back in 1986 when we were looking forward into the future we had to make a choice as to how far we should go in situating the story. It had to be close enough to be recognizable but yet far enough in the future that it could be a different world. So the year we chose to locate our story was (…wait for it…) August 2013!  Here is an excerpt from the story giving the date… 

26 years ago! A quarter of a century must have seemed so far away to a couple of 20 year old’s. Wow!

Anyway, here is a link to the PDF of the actual scan of the published story and of a cleaned up version. I should warn you that you are about to read the “creative” (in quotes, quite deliberately) ramblings of two kids in their early twenties. So click the links at your own risk.

Mishra, P., & Narasimhan, A. (1987, August). And we all fall down. Science Today.

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Note (added August 2024): In writing a post for LinkedIn I added some more story to the backstory that I am including here for the record

37 years ago, I published my first science fiction short story – with Anand Narasimhan. We were in our early 20’s and were reading a lot of New Age science fiction (Ursula, Le Guin, J. G. Ballard, Phillip Dick, Brian Aldiss and more) and were, on the side, experimenting with writing our own stories. The AIDS epidemic was on all of our minds and we lived in this weird paternalistic world, an Indian engineering college in the late 80’s, where freedoms could be curtailed by administration on the smallest of whims, always of course in “our best interest.”  All these things came together in an inchoate way in the writing of this story.  

I remember writing a first draft of the story – just based on this strange vision I had of a future where a new disease had appeared in the world. I based it on my university (BITS Pilani), wrote it out by hand and slipped a few sheets of paper with the story under Anand’s door. When we met up later he told me that the story had made no sense to him – though he sort of liked the mood it evoked. I gave him some context and a few days later there was a new neatly typed version slipped under my door. Incidentally, Anand was one the only people I knew who had his own typewriter (this was of course years before wordprocessors and PC’s and all that). 

What Anand had done was magical. He had kept the parts I had written as is –  but had inserted seemingly random bits of information into the story (the transcript of a broadcast on television, a notice in the hostel and so on) that provided context to the story, and just pulled everything together.

And Anand being Anand, sent it in to Science Today, the only magazine at that time that was publishing science fiction. In large part this was due to its then editor, Mukul Sharma, who had himself written some speculative fiction. (Anand and I later visited the offices of Science Today, a few years later and even met with Mukul Sharma – but that is a story for another day).