Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: busy

Avoid dating your fiction...

Tags: reading, science fiction, writing
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  • 12 comments
fayanora

fayanora

July 8 2010, 23:48:24 UTC 10 years ago

I tend to set my scifi WAY in the future to avoid dating it. My Ah'Koi Bahnis stories take place after 3000 AD, and my Mindeodean stories take place several thousand years in the future.
ysabetwordsmith

Hmm...

ysabetwordsmith

July 9 2010, 00:52:55 UTC 10 years ago

Mine varies. Some is near-future, some is far, some is outta sight.
dsgood

dsgood

July 9 2010, 06:42:24 UTC 10 years ago

That's not sufficient. Think of the stories set in the far future whose history includes the centuries-long Soviet tyranny. Or the stories in which every member of the starship's all-male crew smokes.
christinathena

christinathena

July 9 2010, 00:24:23 UTC 10 years ago

Not sure it's possible to completely avoid it. If you set it in the far future, you pretty much ensure that whatever amazing gee-whiz technology you can think of will seem hopelessly old-fashioned a few decades from now.
ysabetwordsmith

Well...

ysabetwordsmith

July 9 2010, 00:51:09 UTC 10 years ago

It depends on what kind of story you want to tell. Some are highly dependent on dates, on technology, etc. Others really aren't, and you can fuzz out enough irrelevant details to give the story more resilience.
christinathena

Re: Well...

christinathena

July 9 2010, 02:20:05 UTC 10 years ago

If you fuzzed it out enough to avoid dating, it seems to me that you'd also lose the whole point of setting it in the future. It would be a story that could just as easily be placed in the present.
siege

Re: Well...

siege

July 9 2010, 06:16:09 UTC 10 years ago

That makes sense... until you try to write a space opera, or a sociodrama wherein an alien mindset is important to the story. There will always be stories where you have to justify the elements which are not in tune with current technology and understandings, even if you blur the details and don't discuss the story's technology.
dsgood

dsgood

July 9 2010, 06:43:25 UTC 10 years ago

That can be solved by having civilization go extinct.
ysabetwordsmith

*laugh*

ysabetwordsmith

July 9 2010, 06:52:42 UTC 10 years ago

"Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering KABOOM!"
valarltd

valarltd

July 9 2010, 01:07:16 UTC 10 years ago

Some stuff, you can't help it. The early Anita Blake books are set in the 90s. She spends pages every book hunting for payphones to return calls.
siege

siege

July 9 2010, 06:08:47 UTC 10 years ago

I picked up a double entendre from the title of this post.

And you're right, I don't want a Mary Sue for a girlfriend... or to live my romantic life entirely in writing but not in the flesh.
queenmaggie

queenmaggie

July 9 2010, 13:33:40 UTC 10 years ago

That was the first thing that sprang to my mind(sad, isn't it?)

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