Hello everyone
Have you ever read a book and been struck by how dated a detail seems. The book could be modern in every way, but there’s one small thing that ages it. For instance, if a character uses a payphone or an encyclopedia, then you know that the book isn’t set in the present.
Of course, there are times when a novel is set in the past and a payphone or an encyclopedia would help to give a sense of time and place. However, when I am writing a novel set in the here and now, I want to avoid those details that seem normal today, but which will age badly.
Phones
Many (probably most) of us can still remember when public phones were a thing. You could call a number, slip in a few coins, and would be connected. So much of that is alien today, but avoiding obsolescence in a novel is more than a matter of not including public phones—the whole notion of the phone as a way to communicate has changed.
A phone is great for real-time communication—in other words, for communicating with someone at the same time that they are communicating with us (a process that we usually call a phone call…), but people are using phones less to talk these days. Instead, very often, they communicate with text messages (including regular text, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger among many choices).
Text messaging—rather than talking—allows for different nature of communication when compared with one-to-one talking on the phone, for instance:
- the communication can happen at different times (there’s no need for an immediate response)
- one person can continue several different communications with different people simultaneously
- several people can communicate in one conversation
I suspect we will always have one-to-one phone conversations, but at the same time, I would also expect novels that don’t reflect these new communication practices to look increasingly outdated.
Payment
Everyone understands (and most adults/older children possess) a credit/debit card. More recently, we have taken to paying with our phones—using them as a proxy for our credit cards. However, I wonder whether this will still be the case in years to come or will it seem strange to a future generation who pay with a scan of their retina (or however they then pay)?
Whether we pay with a retinal scan or with other biometrics, I would expect that paying with a physical piece of plastic (with a magnetic strip and a hologram) will seem a very quaint practice before too long.
Cars
We are now at the start of a major change, moving from the internal combustion engine to electric vehicles. But the switch to electricity is only the start—many companies are working very hard to develop self-driving cars (and additional safety features which require the driver to have a less active role in driving).
A lot could change—instead of meeting at the filling station, people could meet at the charging station, and given how long it takes to charge an electric vehicle, those meetings may go on for a long time.
And while they’re more common in movies than novels, I wonder about car chases with self-driving cars. I’m not sure that a car chase between two self-driving cars would be that interesting, or that feasible. As I understand, most self-driving cars require a preprogrammed destination and don’t have a “follow that car” mode. And if there’s a car chase, then is the car that’s being followed going to have a “make crazy turns to get away from the pursuer” mode?
What do You Think?
What do you think is commonplace today but is going to be so obsolete that it makes no sense to future readers? Will it be eating meat and gas fired boilers, or will it be laptop computers? Or something else? I’ll leave you to ponder.
Until December.
All the best
Simon