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Technological change
Dec. 1st, 2014 10:30 amI don't find it that hard to accept that the world has changed since I was a child, because I have changed. Even so, it still sometimes startles me to look back at pictures and images of the 1970s and see just quite how old they now seem. Things like Life on Mars startle me by showing (and doubtless exaggerating) how much things have changed. There was a very recent series on Channel 4 which consisted of modern people watching 1970s clips and gasping, "wow! What primitive racist/sexist/perverted/bigoted idiots everyone was back in the 1970s and how enlightened we are now!" (Everyone at work was talking about it, gasping in horror at the clips (and, yes, many of them were quite startling.) I said I hoped to live to see the 2060s version of the show, in which celebrities from 2060 look back at clips of TV in 2014 and gasp in horror at the quaint and shocking social attitudes that were considered normal back in those unenlightened days. This was not the correct reaction, apparently.)
Anyway... I find it a lot harder to accept that the world has continued to change after I became an adult. This fact jumps out at me every now and then, and startles me far more than the 1970s so. I was just reading a book that I was thinking of as "modern," since it's the first book in a current series set in the modern world. At one point, the main characters heard a reference to a local historical figure, and needed to find out who he was. How on earth can we do it? they wondered. The library's on half-day closing today. Who else can we ask? No mention of the internet whatsoever. (And, yes, I know full well that even nowadays, not everyone has access to/can use the internet - I deal with this issue every day at work - but that's not the point.) I turned to the publication details, and the book was published in 1998. and therefore probably written in 1997 or earlier. In one way, it's "modern." In another way - no internet; mobile phones being very much a minority possession; people smoking in indoor public places - it feels like another world.
It must be hard to be writing a long ongoing series in an era of rapid change. What are your choices? You can make your internal chronology match your publication chronology, but you might not want your characters to age that rapidly. You can doggedly stick to your desired internal chronology, and gradually slip into writing historical novels: book 1 is set this year, but book 25 is set 20 years ago. You can just hand-wave it away, and hope no-one notices: book one has 1998-style technology, and book 15 has 2014 technology, but strangely the characters have only aged two years.
Or you can just be plain confusing and contradictory. I'm now on to book 2, which was published in 1999. However, the publisher seems to have decided to "update" it for a new edition, since an event that happened 25 years ago has now been date checked as being 1984. However, since people are still assumed to be incommunicado when away from home, and nobody uses the internet to search for information, and everyone's still smoking inside, it seems like a very pointless update, as if the publishers are trying to con us into thinking it's set "now" when it clearly isn't.
Anyway... I find it a lot harder to accept that the world has continued to change after I became an adult. This fact jumps out at me every now and then, and startles me far more than the 1970s so. I was just reading a book that I was thinking of as "modern," since it's the first book in a current series set in the modern world. At one point, the main characters heard a reference to a local historical figure, and needed to find out who he was. How on earth can we do it? they wondered. The library's on half-day closing today. Who else can we ask? No mention of the internet whatsoever. (And, yes, I know full well that even nowadays, not everyone has access to/can use the internet - I deal with this issue every day at work - but that's not the point.) I turned to the publication details, and the book was published in 1998. and therefore probably written in 1997 or earlier. In one way, it's "modern." In another way - no internet; mobile phones being very much a minority possession; people smoking in indoor public places - it feels like another world.
It must be hard to be writing a long ongoing series in an era of rapid change. What are your choices? You can make your internal chronology match your publication chronology, but you might not want your characters to age that rapidly. You can doggedly stick to your desired internal chronology, and gradually slip into writing historical novels: book 1 is set this year, but book 25 is set 20 years ago. You can just hand-wave it away, and hope no-one notices: book one has 1998-style technology, and book 15 has 2014 technology, but strangely the characters have only aged two years.
Or you can just be plain confusing and contradictory. I'm now on to book 2, which was published in 1999. However, the publisher seems to have decided to "update" it for a new edition, since an event that happened 25 years ago has now been date checked as being 1984. However, since people are still assumed to be incommunicado when away from home, and nobody uses the internet to search for information, and everyone's still smoking inside, it seems like a very pointless update, as if the publishers are trying to con us into thinking it's set "now" when it clearly isn't.
