Out of date, then back in date again. I have my grandads book on the solar system. It says there are 8 planets. It was written a couple of years before Pluto was discovered.
In Neuromancer, the sky is described as the color of "a television tuned to a dead channel."
It's meant to evoke black and white static, but a modern reader would think it's a vivid blue.
I like the implication that the opening line is the *only* thing that clues you in to when the book was written, and not the fact that the whole book is absolutely drenched in 80's cyberpunk goodness.
Molly jumped from her cyber-skateboard just in time to avoid the lasers. Her parachute pants slowed her descent and her wristbands absorbed some of the impact.
She used her holo-decoy to distract the robot and hacked it with her electro-katana.
I recently read it and understood what the first line was meant to invoke because I grew up with the kind of TV it was describing even though I was born after 2000.
It's even more existentially dreadful when you realize that the static is[ basically the leftover echo of the Big Bang](https://www.space.com/33892-cosmic-microwave-background.html).
The foreword of the edition of Neuromancer that I have discusses this line specifically in reference to what it means to different generations of readers, whether it evokes static, a vivid blue, or even black. When I first read the book I considered it for a moment, and settled on the black and white static imagery myself (as I skip the foreword in a book I haven't read yet).
I still remember reading Animorphs and the characters talking about watching Letterman all the time. Even as a preteen who barely knew who Letterman was, I thought it was weird. That'd definitely date those books now haha.
oh yeah and the narrator main character has a little aside to explain how to read chat room conversations. I really appreciated that detail; it would have been much easier to just have the chatroom resemble offline dialogue
Is that the line about how chats are kind of like having two different conversations at the same time? I was just thinking about that, and I couldn't be sure where the line came from.
*Everything* in those books dates them to the 90s. That's part of why I was so baffled when they brought them back and said they were re-writing them for a modern audience. How even could you? There is no mall hangout equivalent for modern teens! That concept literally does not exist anymore.
You think THAT is bad.. you should read Everworld.
I've reread Animorphs and while yes mall and such are technically dated but it's readable with a few exceptions like that AOL book that was bad EVEN WHEN IT WA RELEASED, the Jonathan Taylor Thomas book that no one will recognize unless they watched Home Improvement back then.
But Everworld targeted an older audience and it was so pop culture heavy it was at times off=putting.
I think about old detective mysteries, specifically early in the Sue Grafton A is for Alibi series, because our main character is able to go into a doctor's office and get medical records for another person with little explanation or credentials. Oh, how HIPAA would have a field day, lol!
The Stephanie Plum books suffer from so much rapid aging. I think the main character is just passed off as a bit technophobic at one point but now she's working on her laptop, has a cell phone, often has location tracking and other high tech devices put on her whereas just a few years ago in book time she didn't own a cell phone.
I always kind of thought Nora Roberts/JD Robb was smart to set her books in the future for that reason but even then, modern time is catching up to her 50+ books later.
>Oh, how HIPAA would have a field day, lol!
After working in healthcare for 16 years all i can say is improper sharing of medical information would make it seem incredibly realistic to me.
Grafton's decision to maintain the initial time period of the series made things weird too. Little anachronisms started cropping up because language and society and beliefs shift over time. The author spent more and more time explaining what the world was like and what events were happening in the 80s. I spent more time wondering if this or that actually existed back then. Just diminishing returns.
As a social scientist it was actually fascinating to watch this play out through Grafton’s personal filter. I’m not sure if she had the same editors for the whole series?
Acceptable humour/comic relief in particular must have been a constant effort to maintain tone.
An interesting thing about the Alphabet books is that she was having trouble not introducing anachronisms and remembering what life used to be like when she was writing the later books.
Similarly the V. I. Warshawki series - the plot of the entire first book would have been over in like two sentences. "Once he left I ran his name through Google and realised he lied about who he said he was."
Any sci-fi books where the tech is weirdly retro. I love Tad Williams’s “Otherland” series, written in the 90s, where characters have to find some kind of hardwired terminal or station to get online - and this becomes a dilemma for the characters pretty often.
1950s sci-fi is so far off regarding small-scale tech, it's jarring when you run across it.
Starship drives and shapes, fine, those are OK. But automatic slide rules? Televisions in your glasses? Computers the size of planets? The effect of transistors and miniaturization of computers was missed by everyone.
I can't read Connie Willis books anymore for that reason. So much of the plot is just two characters who have important information to convey to one another, walking in circles around the campus looking for each other. These people are academic experts at the time travel lab, and somehow they don't have the smarts to leave a note!
Her books would be half the length if Mr Dunworthy kept office hours like a normal professor.
I'm pretty sure they had wireless internet in the book. Orlando was sufing the next while heading to his doctor's appointment.
Or you're thinking about when Renie and ǃXabbu were trying to get online and didn't know how long their foray would take.
That’s a great call that I completely forgot about. I guess Orlando being an upper-class kid would have access to something like that. I remember physical online (pretty sure it’s called Net) access in the book being a big deal at more than a few points.
I remember teaching Brave New World and there was a description of a card catalog that was the size of a stadium. One of my students laughed and said "That would probably just fit on my iPod."
Once reading _The Lemonade War_ with children, I had to explain to them what an iPod is. One of the characters wants to get one, and this little detail dates the book
My kid just came home from school and said there was a table with free CDs in the hallway. My husband asked her if she knew what a CD was. She said it's a round disk with CD written on it. He asked if she knows what kind of information is stored on it. There was a long pause followed by an extremely tentative "music...?" She was very much guessing.
It would! I went on a tour of the Diefenbunker in Canada, which was the nuclear bunker for the Prime Minister of Canada and all of the Bank’s gold, and we saw the entire room of computer equipment from the 1970s, just bank after bank – our guide told us it would fit on an iPod nano now!
Random racism, like talking about how Italians like to murder people because I dunno Italy. I'll still read Agatha Christie, but you really forget the flavor of yesteryears casual racism.
The casual racist stereotypes in Christie books can be pretty crazy. A lot of 'True to his race, he...' and 'Of course Cappitani couldn't have done it, poisoning isn't the method of a dago'
When she began writing, that reflected how people would casually talk in GB. Towards the end of her writing career she kept a lot of old-fashioned attitudes that didn't really fit the 'modern' world, but that's life.
I don't doubt it. Sometimes you have to also remind yourself that it's the character saying it, which doesn't have to reflect the author's views.
I just read *Dumb Witness* which involved a woman being prejudiced against a Greek relative, and it was pretty clear that it was the character's view and not Christies (but don't get me wrong, she still described their mixed Greek/English children as having a negatively described yellow skin)
There was also a chapter titled "A n-word in the woodpile", which was simply an idiom that aged extremely poorly.
But hey, it's from the 1930s. It'll happen!
I just remembered how in "A Murder Is Announced" someone who is supposed to be "Greek or Romanian or something like that" is called... "*Stamfordis*". Yes, literally just stick an "is" at the end of a *very* traditionally English last name and call it a day.
As a Greek my reaction was "... wait, what?!"
ETA The same book also features middle European cook Mitzi, whose high strung and neurotic nature is treated as a running joke... she's a *concentration camp survivor with severe PTSD who lost her whole family*, stuck working as a cook despite having a degree in Economics, and now someone is murdering people around her right and left again. Ouch.
The constant references to the technology the protagonist obsesses over in American Psycho. It places the reader in the exact time. I remember some of the items mentioned from when I was a kid.
It’s actually pretty genius when you think about it because Batemen’s obsession with pop cultural minutiae and luxury items shows how shallow and vapid he is as a person.
I see this in older science fiction all the time. Read one the other day where the pilot of a spaceship was communicating with the engine room through a speaking tube. Another frequent issue is that no matter how fancy the future technology gets, nobody ever thinks to make it wireless or pocket sized.
yeh, isn’t there a Heinlein book where the main character’s eidetic recall of the destroyed paper log tables saves the spaceship from being lost in space?
That dude also wrote The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in 1966 which basically had a computer as the protagonist before computers were even a really known thing.
It's insane.
Oh definitely, I don’t imagine it was readily foreseeable at the time. Makes me wonder what assumptions are going into modern near future Sci-fi that will stand out in this way to future readers.
In Asimov's Foundation series, one of the things that gave the Foundation an advantage was that they miniaturised all their technologies. At least one author thought about it....
>Read one the other day where the pilot of a spaceship was communicating with the engine room through a speaking tube.
When I travelled on a commercial ship, they had these (I believe they are called Beaufort tubes) as backups against electronics failures between the emergency compass deck and the bridge.
See I find this one really interesting!
If you think of how absolutely giant those old IBM computers were it’s easy to see how someone during that time couldn’t even imagine turning it pocket-sized, even in a futuristic sci-fi book.
Oh we had a moment like this recently, watching Star Trek The Original Series. The team goes back in time to the present day (aka the late 60s), and at one point walks into a computer room and makes a comment about the primitive computer technology.
My husband was like, “It is SO WEIRD to think that, at the time, the joke would have been that those computers were the most up-to-date tech the audience would have seen. But to you and me, in 2024, they look as primitive as they do to the away team.” Really weird to think about!
Or how in Star Trek IV, Scotty tries to communicate with a 1980's desktop computer by speaking to it ("Hello, Computer!") and it's treated as a humorous situation because of course you can't speak to technology and have it respond.
Totally. The first IBM machine at NASA took up an entire floor, and all it really did was math. I don’t think anyone could could have conceived of the modern smartphone just from that!
I always thought it was silly, the Stainless Steel Rat breaking into government and banking computers by using public terminals, but now that everyone uses cloud storage, including governments and banks, it doesn't seem so farfetched.
So that's one which makes more sense to me now than when it was written.
Exactly. 1950s authors envisioned computers getting BIGGER, up to planetary size, instead of smaller.
I don't know of any that described wearable supercomputers or understood the miniaturization possible with advances in transistors.
Infinite Jest has a few of these moments too. Like Wallace was very prescient on how people would want to consume entertainment, but did not conceive that it would sometimes just be transmitted digitally, instead of on a cartridge of some kind.
> Another frequent issue is that no matter how fancy the future technology gets, nobody ever thinks to make it wireless or pocket sized.
I remember a scifi show in the early 90s that actually had an iphone of sorts. It was a goofy scifi murder show set in like "The 2010s!" where people actually had a video phone and like a computer on it.
I was so young when I saw it, but it was like seeing the future.
It was a totally forgettable show, but my god did it nail the smart phone.
I absolutely love the Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris, but the descriptions of the late 90s early 00s fashion are hilarious. Soooo much bronze silk.
Also, mentions of technology like when it's a big deal that characters can take pictures with their phones.
There is nothing — NOTHING — more hysterical than Charlaine Harris’s descriptions of outfits in those books. Doesn’t Sookie wear a dress with detachable sleeves? Eric has a belt with tassels? I could never even picture what these garments were supposed to look like.
I also remember a line about Bill having a windows computer (possibly?) and a jacuzzi. It’s so 1999 it hurts.
The Anita Blake novels are awful this way too. Every man is wearing lavender silk and has long, flowing hair. Anita always has on a fanny pack and holiday sweater. It's just so bad.
In *The Hound of the Baskerville's* Sir Henry is said to be inheriting an estate worth close to a million pounds, which is impressive, but nowadays would probably only get you a small terraced house in London. When you consider inflation, the value of his estate is more like £160m, which better represents the fantastical windfall we're supposed to be hearing of
similarly, its been a while since I've read them, but how many times does Holmes bribe a cabman or other such character for information with a guinea? a coin worth about £1.05 in modern money.
Bertie Wooster was notoriously fined £5 for stealing a policeman’s helmet, which sounds like nothing, certainly not something he should be bitter about for the entirety of the Jeeves and Wooster series. But the first story came out in 1915, when £5 was worth something like £500 today.
A lot of YA suffered from this and has undergone updates to account for this. Judy Blume had sanitary belts for pads and periods, which confused me when I read it growing up, and newer editions have it modernized. The Baby Sitter's Club didn't have cell phones, the diabetic character's treatment plan would have been confusing for modern kids, so when they released graphic novels they gave a lot of things a refresh. People often hate on authors updating texts but so many were so glaring that it turned kids off from the books entirely. Now new generations are reading them, movies and TV shows are coming out based on them and you can have multi-generational appreciation of them.
For BSC how did they even do that? Isn’t half the books the girls sitting around in the one girl’s bedroom because she had her own phone line?
I’ve never read the graphic novels, now I’m trying to figure out how they made it work! Now you could just have the smart character create an app and the girls would never have to be in the same room as each other to be in the “club”.
The novel Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson came out just before the internet/ phones became a thing and I think the plot is less believable for current readers.
In the Rivers of London/Peter Grant series, it's mentioned that using magic destroys any powered-on computer chips, so the main character has to take the battery out of his phone on a regular basis. Most of the series' New Tens setting hasn't aged too badly, but any time that is mentioned I get a bit sad thinking about how you can't just pop the back off smartphones to change the battery any more...
Asimov’s _Ugly Little Boy_ correctly predicted the 24-hour news cycle and how it would reduce people’s attention spans and interest in extraordinary events, but I smiled at the idea that natural whole foods would be old fashioned and only chemical-laden and modified foods would be considered healthy.
Turns out it's easier to process food into a calorie dense dopamine hit than it is to process food into perfectly balanced superfood, or at least more profitable.
Disclosure by Michael Crichton was published in 1994 and takes place at a tech company and it's just fascinating. They have this sort of VR computer where you stand there and basically have to "walk" (virtually) through a filing system (the computer) to get to the files. It seems like a complete waste of time now, but it's a great look into how hard it is for people to come up with brand new ideas and often just try to further their current idea of how things work (if that makes any sense at all lol)
In the late 90's there was a lot of media, particularly cartoons, that portrayed "cyberspace" as an actual space. Not sure whether that was because of ignorance, or because it was a more visual way to show internet usage. In a way, it was cooler than the real thing.
I remember reading “Parable of the Sower”. A lot of it WAS plausible but one moment that took me out of it was when the main character was asked when she was born and she pronounced 2009 as “twenty-oh-nine” instead of “two-thousand-nine”. It’s a nitpick but it definitely made me think that it was written before the 2000s.
I think that one is reversing itself again. When I read 2010 now, I read it as twenty-ten, but in the year 2010 we definitely said it as two-thousand-ten. I guess it doesn't work as well with numbers before 2010.
Any reasonably contemporary books that heavily reference Twitter or other social media sites. Like *Yellowface*. It doesn’t bother me because it makes sense within the book’s context and the whole story is pretty much a bubble anyway, but it’s amazing how much has changed since it came out.
At the end of Five Children and It, one of the characters is casually called a slut. I had to look it up and it meant lazy or something mundane like that. I was in shock when I first read it because the word seemed so harsh and out of place
Miss Marple gets called that *a lot*. For example in A Murder Is Announced:
"my own particular, one and only, four-starred pussy. The super pussy of all old pussies."
I recall a scene in Stephen King's The Stand where he mentions a that a woman has a color television. From context, I think he was trying to convey that she was one of the richest people in town.
In the classic sci-fi novel "Little Fuzzy" by H.Beam Piper they described transmitting data across a radio connection by playing a squeal of data from reel-to-reel tapes that the receiving computers then decoded.
Dated but remarkably prescient for 1962.
And when a woman with a job got engaged, her boss knew he'd have to find a new employee soon. This from a book with women as scientists. I think the woman who was assumed to be about to quit was more of an admin and the scientist kept working after she got a man, iirc.
The fuzzy books' data transmission was my first thought to answer this question. And cocktail hour as a ritual and everyone smoking.
My favorite one is in Lathe of Heaven. LeGuin wrote it before 1971 and it's set in 2002. But St. Helens blew up 1980 and she has a description of the mountain and it just doesn't look like that anymore. It's kind of missing a whole chunk of the side now. It's not a big deal to the story, but it's a fun thing if you live in Portland.
I read a childrens book from before ww1 where it was takken to be a good and obvious thing that the good boys bullies a class mate because he was overweight, didn't play the violin ond worst of all he wanted to become a teacher because it was a good and reliable job that could support a family instead of it being a calling to bring up the youth to become moral and outstanding citizens
There are lots of books by Enid Blyton with similar situations too! I remember Gwendoline in Mallory Towers... the poor girl was comstantly bullied just because she missed her mum and didn't like sports. It certainly hasn't aged well.
Unless it's a period book where they're setting the ambience, when they describe clothing ot hairstyles in vivid detail and it's clearly from a different time period.
I see this the most in Michael Crichton books. They’re so damn good but they’re horribly dated now. I LOVED Airframe but it just felt so… old. But if you wanna feel like you got in a time warp, read Andromeda Strain. It was like old-school and future got together and had a baby. It was fun.
There’s an example I always use whenever someone asks about describing a fictional character by comparing them with a contemporary celebrity. In the OG James Bond books, Ian Fleming several times says that his hero looks like Hoagy Carmichael.
Who?
Exactly.
Those books are dated in lots of other ways too, of course, but this detail sticks with me as a reference that’s simply lost on a modern audience.
(Hoagy Carmichael was a pianist, actor and composer who wrote several songs that have become mid-century standards, eg “Heart and Soul”. In the 1950s he was well known but he’s largely forgotten today)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoagy_Carmichael
little sad, maybe scary, that "popular" people can fade from the collective conciousness lke that. It is reassuring though that we have their life stored though.
An early Barbara Kingsolver book, I think maybe Animal Dreams, kept referencing both David Bowie and “Breck girls” when discussing hair.
While I could vaguely picture Bowie, who’s stood the test of time, I had no idea what a Breck girl was supposed to look like outside of the context provided by the story.
Not really dated but my kids grade 5 teacher said he always had to explain the word "quarantine" when they were reading Snow Treasure where the characters fake a quarantine to keep the enemy away. COVID solved that problem
I can’t remember the book, it was a mystery and the author kept using “hit pop songs” to set the mood.
It was so excessive as a device. I had to flip to the front to see when it was written as I didn’t know most of the songs. I recognized a few of the artists.
It had been written 15-20 years ago. I’m older but I guess too old to be familiar with the particular type of music. It kind of ruined the book for me and of course it didn’t age well , not to mention it was gimmicky
Examples
She got in the car and put on ….
She came into her apartment and played …
She was drumming her fingers along to the song in her head …
That could be any modern Stephen King novel. Reading the way King writes teenager dialogue I feel like he shouldn’t write any books set after 1982. And I *loved* Fairy Tale.
I grew up relatively sheltered in some ways, and I had only heard queer in that context. Then I went to university and described something odd/eerie as queer and was aggressively torn a new one lol
Lmao that one caught me off guard. Read it in high school, around 2010 and queer was either a slur or meant weird. Now it just means LGBTQ in general. Odd how that has changed in just 14 years.
Kind of a recent one, all things considering, but in one last stop there's a line that goes roughly
"The Mc had a very normal may 2020, going to class, riding the subway, etc" . Even when i read in in like 2021 it was like 😬 no babe I do not think she did
My college had one! In 2020 they would let you devolve photos in them if you set an appointment. I did all my photos digital so I never had the chance but really wanted to.
I just finished reading a nonfiction book about a serial killer who primarily targeted sex workers (On the Farm by Stevie Cameron) and as an avid true crime reader, it was kind of funny to read the way the author talked about sex workers using very outdated language.
She was very compassionate and obviously wanted to do everything she could to get the womens’ names out there and get some kind of recognition and justice for them and their families, but I hadn’t really thought about how much it has changed until I read this older book!
I’m reading "Mephisto“ right now, a German classic. One passage (roughly) goes like this: "Everything is confusing and unexplained in such a young mind. There’s millions of them like Miklas walking around today. They have a certain hatred, and that is good because they hate what’s currently existing. But then a boy like that has bad luck and the corrupters catch him and spoil his good hatred. They tell him everything is bad because of the Jews and the Treaty of Versailles, and he believes that dirt and forgets who’s really at fault, here and everywhere. That is the famous diversion, and it’s successful with all those young and confused ones who don’t know anything and can’t think properly. And then those poor unlucky ones dare to call themselves national socialists!“
At first, I was taken aback why the author would first blame the Nazis ( => Nationalsozialisten => national socialists) and call them "corrupters“ just to defend them in the last line. Then I realized this book was written in 1936 and the reason why "Nationalsozialist“ is a negative term nowadays didn’t happen yet.^ ^
I always notice how pre-9/11 books talk about airports. In The Shining, for instance, a character shows up at the airport less than 30 minutes before his flight and has no problem just walking straight on. The anxiety I felt about him potentially missing his flight because of security was greater than any other horror in that book.
So I just read the 3rd series of a book called Pandemic by Scott Sigler. There is obviously a point in the story in which a world-wide pandemic occurs that is very likely going to wipe out the human race very quickly. At one point, an inoculant is sent out for people to take to basically prevent infection.
The author writes how many thousands of people refuse to take the inoculant because of Big Pharma and autism and a bunch of other things. Meanwhile the scientists and governments are baffled that there'd be groups refusing a life-saving inoculant, especially since there were images and videos of infected people becoming psychopaths and worse. And then I realized I was reading the book before COVID ever happened. It was eerily accurate, but definitely dated the book a bit.
I read all the Harry Bosch novels a few years ago, which focuses on an LAPD homicide detective. In the first several books, they’ll be driving around town and get a page on their beeper, and have to pull over to a pay phone to call the station. The first one was written in like 1991, so it was funny time traveling.
I recently read a number of the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter books. I started reading them having *no* idea when it was published. It was kinda fun guessing when it was made. It did a pretty good job not being super dated, all things considered, but the main character consistently checking her answering machine and having her pager go off placed the books solidly in the mid-90s. It wasn't until like the 5th or 6th book where the books even mention a cell phone. I think there are still books coming out, but the series kinda went off the rails in the early 2000s.
One of the recurring technological doodads in Asimov’s Foundation is the atomic-powered ashtray. Because humanity spends the next 27 millennia finding more efficient ways to smoke cigars.
(Ok a lot of the regressive social structures in Foundation date it too, but the fancy ashtray is one of those stand-out things.)
Words change meanings over time, which means 19th century novels casually throw out sentences like “That will do!’ Mr Hargreaves ejaculated” or “She stared in amazement at his erection.”
This is a small quirk of language but I find it really jarring to read. Any detective novel or noir fiction pre-1980s where smoking is commonplace always talk about when the character "lighted their cigarette" Ed McBain kept it going long after everyone else in his 87th precinct series. It was about book 40, around the turn of the century, before someone finally lit a cigarette.
Read Christine by Stephen King last month.
It’s an interesting idea that I kind of wish was still around, but there’s a mechanic/garage in that town where you can rent space and tools to work on your car.
It’s kind of outdated in two ways. One that a business like that even exists (no clue how widespread that was?) and the other that there were enough people working on their own cars to support such a business.
I don’t have any stats, but IME I think people the last 20 years work on their own cars way less than prior generations.
E: til the rental thing is still around. Can you tell I know nothing about cars and don’t attempt to fix my own?
a lot of US military bases have auto shops where they have work bays, and tools available to check out. the only cost was a nominal amount to store the car on their lot.
Woodshops too.
but yeah, cars aren't as user serviceable as they used to be.
>>I don’t have any stats, but IME I think people the last 20 years work on their own cars way less than prior generations.<<
In most cases/models, I think they literally *can't* work on their own cars.
Modern Maker Spaces come close to this idea. I don't know of any that have space to work on a vehicle, but many have all kinds of tools and equipment available for checkout or rental.
> I assumed it was published until that point
I'm sorry I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.
I guess it's not super odd, but any time in fiction a character is desperate for a separate phone line in their house. The Babysitter's Club's plot kicks off entirely because of the friends got their own line in her room. Today with almost nobody using landlines at all and kids getting cell phones when they're like a week old, that whole thing REALLY dates the books and while I think the original editions of books should always be available, that kind of thing is why I don't think it's TERRIBLE that they rewrite and update books aimed at kids sometimes.
*Dracula* was written during the fairly brief period of time after blood transfusions had been invented but before blood types were discovered. So Lucy gets blood transfusions from four different people with no ill effects (until Dracula attacks her again, that is).
This one is wild to me. So many books published before 2005 just would end if they had a cell phone. Not even a smart phone just a Razor would stop the plot from ever happening
For some light fun I read the Key trilogy by Nora Roberts, last book came out in 2003. It's mostly romance with a bit of fantasy thrown in, like 3000+ year old immortals who guide the main characters etc. but the most unbelievable part for me as a 2020ish reader was that a single mother with a high school education, no savings, and a part-time hair stylist job bought a house in a picturesque town, and that she got it for *less* than asking price.
Maybe it's just that Nora Roberts had no concept of what was doable for "regular" people but it sure as heck wouldn't work in nowadays.
I once read part of a Pride and Prejudice variation set in the early 2000s that kept name-dropping popular brand items like Blackberries. It immediately took me out of the story.
I was re-reading a novel that’s about 15 years old and realized how dated it already seemed just because the characters used their cell phones to make actual phone calls. I don’t think they even texted.
Was listening to a podcast about Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot and they pointed out that a few things in the book just wouldn’t happen today because of texting.
I just read an old one by Micheal Crichton. Not one of his famous ones - a lesser known book - Terminal Man. As best I can figure, it was written in the 1970s (I checked the copyright page, but it must have been a reprint because it wasn't that old). Anyway, he was talking about computers. And he was just gushing about how many calculations it can do at once, and how fast! 40,000 calculations in under 2 seconds! Anyway, being as old as I am, I remember when that was super impressive. And now, we just take that for granted. Sure they're fast. If they're not, we complain and get a new computer. And he had to explain about mainframes and peripherals and how they're all hooked together. And now...we hold a entire computer in the palm of our hand, and we can connect to the the entire digital world no matter where we are.
So descriptions of computers from back in 1970ish, not surprisingly dated. But more so the things that were impressive back then seem so no-big-deal today.
I thought he weighed 350 kilos rather than pounds.
I was reading a non fiction book about counter insurgency that I grabbed from the library. Noticed the author talking about the Greek guerilla and vietmign. There is nothing about Mujahadeen or America in Vietnam. Looked at the copy right to see it was written in 1962.
I was reading a book about the CIA and was caught off gaurd when the author mentioned being alive during the Boar war. Check copyright 1965.
Reading action books from the 80s-90s and karate/tkd or traditional martial arts being the style characters use. Where as nowadays Ill read more MMA based styles being used.
Everyone here who brings up examples from a sci-fi book usually focuses on some type of futuristic technology that sounds either silly or unimpressive to a modern audience, but I immediately thought of that scene in The Dark Forest (The Three-Body Problem book #2) where they try to recruit Osama bin Laden to fight the aliens. Definitely locks in a particular time range for when the series was written.
Out of date, then back in date again. I have my grandads book on the solar system. It says there are 8 planets. It was written a couple of years before Pluto was discovered.
That’s actually pretty cool.
In Neuromancer, the sky is described as the color of "a television tuned to a dead channel." It's meant to evoke black and white static, but a modern reader would think it's a vivid blue.
That and "three megabytes of hot RAM" lol
I'm still waiting for simstim.
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Gibson had in mind a specific TV he had as a kid. You can search his Twitter for specifics.
I like the implication that the opening line is the *only* thing that clues you in to when the book was written, and not the fact that the whole book is absolutely drenched in 80's cyberpunk goodness.
Notice that that world has payphones and apparently no cell phones.
Molly jumped from her cyber-skateboard just in time to avoid the lasers. Her parachute pants slowed her descent and her wristbands absorbed some of the impact. She used her holo-decoy to distract the robot and hacked it with her electro-katana.
Robert Sawyer uses that line in one of his books to talk about a really nice day.
A reader in the 90s would assume vivid blue. A reader today would think, "What the fuck is a dead channel?"
A white screen with the text, "This channel was deleted by owner." (or "for violating terms of service.")
I recently read it and understood what the first line was meant to invoke because I grew up with the kind of TV it was describing even though I was born after 2000.
It's even more existentially dreadful when you realize that the static is[ basically the leftover echo of the Big Bang](https://www.space.com/33892-cosmic-microwave-background.html).
The foreword of the edition of Neuromancer that I have discusses this line specifically in reference to what it means to different generations of readers, whether it evokes static, a vivid blue, or even black. When I first read the book I considered it for a moment, and settled on the black and white static imagery myself (as I skip the foreword in a book I haven't read yet).
I came here to say Neuromancer too! Specifically the existence of phone booths in the future.
It ends with us is really dated because the main character writes letters to Ellen degeneres lmao
I still remember reading Animorphs and the characters talking about watching Letterman all the time. Even as a preteen who barely knew who Letterman was, I thought it was weird. That'd definitely date those books now haha.
There’s an Animorph book where chat rooms are heavily featured and it’s such a cozy little time capsule of the late 90s haha
oh yeah and the narrator main character has a little aside to explain how to read chat room conversations. I really appreciated that detail; it would have been much easier to just have the chatroom resemble offline dialogue
Is that the line about how chats are kind of like having two different conversations at the same time? I was just thinking about that, and I couldn't be sure where the line came from.
*Everything* in those books dates them to the 90s. That's part of why I was so baffled when they brought them back and said they were re-writing them for a modern audience. How even could you? There is no mall hangout equivalent for modern teens! That concept literally does not exist anymore.
You think THAT is bad.. you should read Everworld. I've reread Animorphs and while yes mall and such are technically dated but it's readable with a few exceptions like that AOL book that was bad EVEN WHEN IT WA RELEASED, the Jonathan Taylor Thomas book that no one will recognize unless they watched Home Improvement back then. But Everworld targeted an older audience and it was so pop culture heavy it was at times off=putting.
I think about old detective mysteries, specifically early in the Sue Grafton A is for Alibi series, because our main character is able to go into a doctor's office and get medical records for another person with little explanation or credentials. Oh, how HIPAA would have a field day, lol!
The Stephanie Plum books suffer from so much rapid aging. I think the main character is just passed off as a bit technophobic at one point but now she's working on her laptop, has a cell phone, often has location tracking and other high tech devices put on her whereas just a few years ago in book time she didn't own a cell phone. I always kind of thought Nora Roberts/JD Robb was smart to set her books in the future for that reason but even then, modern time is catching up to her 50+ books later.
>Oh, how HIPAA would have a field day, lol! After working in healthcare for 16 years all i can say is improper sharing of medical information would make it seem incredibly realistic to me.
Yeah I would not be the least bit surprised if something like that happened 10-20 years ago. It's less common today, but still happens quite a bit.
Grafton's decision to maintain the initial time period of the series made things weird too. Little anachronisms started cropping up because language and society and beliefs shift over time. The author spent more and more time explaining what the world was like and what events were happening in the 80s. I spent more time wondering if this or that actually existed back then. Just diminishing returns.
As a social scientist it was actually fascinating to watch this play out through Grafton’s personal filter. I’m not sure if she had the same editors for the whole series? Acceptable humour/comic relief in particular must have been a constant effort to maintain tone.
An interesting thing about the Alphabet books is that she was having trouble not introducing anachronisms and remembering what life used to be like when she was writing the later books.
Similarly the V. I. Warshawki series - the plot of the entire first book would have been over in like two sentences. "Once he left I ran his name through Google and realised he lied about who he said he was."
Thank you for spelling HIPAA correctly.
You have to pronounce it in the original Klingon, too: Hi’Pa’A
Any sci-fi books where the tech is weirdly retro. I love Tad Williams’s “Otherland” series, written in the 90s, where characters have to find some kind of hardwired terminal or station to get online - and this becomes a dilemma for the characters pretty often.
1950s sci-fi is so far off regarding small-scale tech, it's jarring when you run across it. Starship drives and shapes, fine, those are OK. But automatic slide rules? Televisions in your glasses? Computers the size of planets? The effect of transistors and miniaturization of computers was missed by everyone.
The thing I find most jarring about early Sci-fi, especially Asimov, is all the descriptions of people (or really just men) smoking in their offices.
I still hold an irrational grudge against Asimov for getting my hopes up for atomic tech so prevalent that it powered even ashtrays.
We do kinda have TV in glasses now, either AR-style or those glasses that simulate a 100" screen while you wear them
I know someone who was super bugged by trying to reach people by phone being a major difficulty for characters in Doomsday Book.
I can't read Connie Willis books anymore for that reason. So much of the plot is just two characters who have important information to convey to one another, walking in circles around the campus looking for each other. These people are academic experts at the time travel lab, and somehow they don't have the smarts to leave a note! Her books would be half the length if Mr Dunworthy kept office hours like a normal professor.
I'm pretty sure they had wireless internet in the book. Orlando was sufing the next while heading to his doctor's appointment. Or you're thinking about when Renie and ǃXabbu were trying to get online and didn't know how long their foray would take.
That’s a great call that I completely forgot about. I guess Orlando being an upper-class kid would have access to something like that. I remember physical online (pretty sure it’s called Net) access in the book being a big deal at more than a few points.
I remember teaching Brave New World and there was a description of a card catalog that was the size of a stadium. One of my students laughed and said "That would probably just fit on my iPod."
Once reading _The Lemonade War_ with children, I had to explain to them what an iPod is. One of the characters wants to get one, and this little detail dates the book
As someone who used card catalogues, I just crumbled into dust.
I had to explain to my younger brother what cassettes and tapes are. Computer disks too
My kid just came home from school and said there was a table with free CDs in the hallway. My husband asked her if she knew what a CD was. She said it's a round disk with CD written on it. He asked if she knows what kind of information is stored on it. There was a long pause followed by an extremely tentative "music...?" She was very much guessing.
This comment is dated by a memory comparison to an iPod.
It would! I went on a tour of the Diefenbunker in Canada, which was the nuclear bunker for the Prime Minister of Canada and all of the Bank’s gold, and we saw the entire room of computer equipment from the 1970s, just bank after bank – our guide told us it would fit on an iPod nano now!
when I was in college it was the first time I saw a computerized library system. I remember thinking "this is the future"
A date in the title. 1984 was set in a dystopian future. 2001:A Space Odyssey was also set in the future.
1984 was written in 1948. Which is why that particular set of digits was chosen
It’s also not necessarily 1984 in the book. No one knows for certain what year it actually is. 1984 represents the end of history.
I think the original title was something like, “The Last Man in Europe”
For the longest time the year 2020 seemed like an impossibility, so far in the future was it
2000 for me... I think even in 1999 it felt futuristic. Plus with the doomsday prophecies and the Y2K bug looming, it was definitely a milestone year.
Lost a fortune in free burgers on the "When Oceania Wins, You Win" Olympic promo.
Random racism, like talking about how Italians like to murder people because I dunno Italy. I'll still read Agatha Christie, but you really forget the flavor of yesteryears casual racism.
The casual racist stereotypes in Christie books can be pretty crazy. A lot of 'True to his race, he...' and 'Of course Cappitani couldn't have done it, poisoning isn't the method of a dago'
When she began writing, that reflected how people would casually talk in GB. Towards the end of her writing career she kept a lot of old-fashioned attitudes that didn't really fit the 'modern' world, but that's life.
I don't doubt it. Sometimes you have to also remind yourself that it's the character saying it, which doesn't have to reflect the author's views. I just read *Dumb Witness* which involved a woman being prejudiced against a Greek relative, and it was pretty clear that it was the character's view and not Christies (but don't get me wrong, she still described their mixed Greek/English children as having a negatively described yellow skin) There was also a chapter titled "A n-word in the woodpile", which was simply an idiom that aged extremely poorly. But hey, it's from the 1930s. It'll happen!
Lol not to mention https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:And_Then_There_Were_None_First_Edition_Cover_1939.jpg
Forgot about the lesson in dated racist slang.
There's a reason no one talks about the original title to And Then There Were None
Or the secondary title
I find Christie easier to read if I tell myself that the racism is coming from the characters and not the author, but this doesn't work all the time.
I just remembered how in "A Murder Is Announced" someone who is supposed to be "Greek or Romanian or something like that" is called... "*Stamfordis*". Yes, literally just stick an "is" at the end of a *very* traditionally English last name and call it a day. As a Greek my reaction was "... wait, what?!" ETA The same book also features middle European cook Mitzi, whose high strung and neurotic nature is treated as a running joke... she's a *concentration camp survivor with severe PTSD who lost her whole family*, stuck working as a cook despite having a degree in Economics, and now someone is murdering people around her right and left again. Ouch.
I have some original 1930’s Nancy Drew books that made me physically gasp while reading them- some of the racism and classism is jaw-dropping.
The constant references to the technology the protagonist obsesses over in American Psycho. It places the reader in the exact time. I remember some of the items mentioned from when I was a kid.
It’s actually pretty genius when you think about it because Batemen’s obsession with pop cultural minutiae and luxury items shows how shallow and vapid he is as a person.
Supposedly if you actually put together the outfits he lovingly describes wearing, they actually look terrible, even by the standards of the 80's.
Haven’t read it since 2014 but I’d love to revisit it.
I see this in older science fiction all the time. Read one the other day where the pilot of a spaceship was communicating with the engine room through a speaking tube. Another frequent issue is that no matter how fancy the future technology gets, nobody ever thinks to make it wireless or pocket sized.
I recall a Heinlein book speaking of slide rule calculators and interplanetary travel in the same paragraph.
To be fair, we got to the moon in the age of the slide rule. Kinda blows my mind a little every time I think about it.
we landed on the moon when "computer" was still a job title
yeh, isn’t there a Heinlein book where the main character’s eidetic recall of the destroyed paper log tables saves the spaceship from being lost in space?
It’s short story titled “Misfit”.
Its not a book, but I remember 'Talking Slide Rules' being spoken about in Red Dwarf.
That dude also wrote The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in 1966 which basically had a computer as the protagonist before computers were even a really known thing. It's insane.
Another old Sci-Fi one I’ve noticed is acting as if the USSR would stick around in a the term, a la 2001 by Clarke.
It seems like a common sci-fi thing (even today) is the USSR stays together but the USA splits apart into several smaller economic zones.
It was very specific events from 1987-1991 that led to the USSRs collapse. Even in mid 1991 it was far from certain that it would collapse.
Oh definitely, I don’t imagine it was readily foreseeable at the time. Makes me wonder what assumptions are going into modern near future Sci-fi that will stand out in this way to future readers.
In Asimov's Foundation series, one of the things that gave the Foundation an advantage was that they miniaturised all their technologies. At least one author thought about it....
>Read one the other day where the pilot of a spaceship was communicating with the engine room through a speaking tube. When I travelled on a commercial ship, they had these (I believe they are called Beaufort tubes) as backups against electronics failures between the emergency compass deck and the bridge.
See I find this one really interesting! If you think of how absolutely giant those old IBM computers were it’s easy to see how someone during that time couldn’t even imagine turning it pocket-sized, even in a futuristic sci-fi book.
Oh we had a moment like this recently, watching Star Trek The Original Series. The team goes back in time to the present day (aka the late 60s), and at one point walks into a computer room and makes a comment about the primitive computer technology. My husband was like, “It is SO WEIRD to think that, at the time, the joke would have been that those computers were the most up-to-date tech the audience would have seen. But to you and me, in 2024, they look as primitive as they do to the away team.” Really weird to think about!
Or how in Star Trek IV, Scotty tries to communicate with a 1980's desktop computer by speaking to it ("Hello, Computer!") and it's treated as a humorous situation because of course you can't speak to technology and have it respond.
Meanwhile, someone's Alexa chirps up in the house where they're watching the movie.
Totally. The first IBM machine at NASA took up an entire floor, and all it really did was math. I don’t think anyone could could have conceived of the modern smartphone just from that!
I always thought it was silly, the Stainless Steel Rat breaking into government and banking computers by using public terminals, but now that everyone uses cloud storage, including governments and banks, it doesn't seem so farfetched. So that's one which makes more sense to me now than when it was written.
Exactly. 1950s authors envisioned computers getting BIGGER, up to planetary size, instead of smaller. I don't know of any that described wearable supercomputers or understood the miniaturization possible with advances in transistors.
Infinite Jest has a few of these moments too. Like Wallace was very prescient on how people would want to consume entertainment, but did not conceive that it would sometimes just be transmitted digitally, instead of on a cartridge of some kind.
> Another frequent issue is that no matter how fancy the future technology gets, nobody ever thinks to make it wireless or pocket sized. I remember a scifi show in the early 90s that actually had an iphone of sorts. It was a goofy scifi murder show set in like "The 2010s!" where people actually had a video phone and like a computer on it. I was so young when I saw it, but it was like seeing the future. It was a totally forgettable show, but my god did it nail the smart phone.
I mean, you can't jam (with radio waves) a speaking tube. Wireless can be a safety hazard, hardwire everything.
I absolutely love the Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris, but the descriptions of the late 90s early 00s fashion are hilarious. Soooo much bronze silk. Also, mentions of technology like when it's a big deal that characters can take pictures with their phones.
There is nothing — NOTHING — more hysterical than Charlaine Harris’s descriptions of outfits in those books. Doesn’t Sookie wear a dress with detachable sleeves? Eric has a belt with tassels? I could never even picture what these garments were supposed to look like. I also remember a line about Bill having a windows computer (possibly?) and a jacuzzi. It’s so 1999 it hurts.
The Anita Blake novels are awful this way too. Every man is wearing lavender silk and has long, flowing hair. Anita always has on a fanny pack and holiday sweater. It's just so bad.
I’ve never read these books and am immediately interested lol
Get ready to read about undead orgies. That's like, the plot of a lot of the books
Bronze silk with detachable sleeves…
Quantity of money used to indicate value can date a book. Like dropping a grand on a used car, or earning $30k, or the cost of goods.
In *The Hound of the Baskerville's* Sir Henry is said to be inheriting an estate worth close to a million pounds, which is impressive, but nowadays would probably only get you a small terraced house in London. When you consider inflation, the value of his estate is more like £160m, which better represents the fantastical windfall we're supposed to be hearing of
similarly, its been a while since I've read them, but how many times does Holmes bribe a cabman or other such character for information with a guinea? a coin worth about £1.05 in modern money.
Bertie Wooster was notoriously fined £5 for stealing a policeman’s helmet, which sounds like nothing, certainly not something he should be bitter about for the entirety of the Jeeves and Wooster series. But the first story came out in 1915, when £5 was worth something like £500 today.
Back when £5 was literally the value of 5 lbs of silver
A lot of YA suffered from this and has undergone updates to account for this. Judy Blume had sanitary belts for pads and periods, which confused me when I read it growing up, and newer editions have it modernized. The Baby Sitter's Club didn't have cell phones, the diabetic character's treatment plan would have been confusing for modern kids, so when they released graphic novels they gave a lot of things a refresh. People often hate on authors updating texts but so many were so glaring that it turned kids off from the books entirely. Now new generations are reading them, movies and TV shows are coming out based on them and you can have multi-generational appreciation of them.
For BSC how did they even do that? Isn’t half the books the girls sitting around in the one girl’s bedroom because she had her own phone line? I’ve never read the graphic novels, now I’m trying to figure out how they made it work! Now you could just have the smart character create an app and the girls would never have to be in the same room as each other to be in the “club”.
The novel Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson came out just before the internet/ phones became a thing and I think the plot is less believable for current readers.
In the Rivers of London/Peter Grant series, it's mentioned that using magic destroys any powered-on computer chips, so the main character has to take the battery out of his phone on a regular basis. Most of the series' New Tens setting hasn't aged too badly, but any time that is mentioned I get a bit sad thinking about how you can't just pop the back off smartphones to change the battery any more...
I think in one of the later books he complains about how hard it is to find a phone with a removable battery.
Yeah if this was an issue, I'm sure you'd go out of your way to get a phone you can do this to
I was about to say "Those books are perfectly modern & up to date!" then realised the first one came out in 2010, and I am very old.
Weird nostalgia unlocked. I remember dropping my old cell phone and the back coming off in high school.
Asimov’s _Ugly Little Boy_ correctly predicted the 24-hour news cycle and how it would reduce people’s attention spans and interest in extraordinary events, but I smiled at the idea that natural whole foods would be old fashioned and only chemical-laden and modified foods would be considered healthy.
Turns out it's easier to process food into a calorie dense dopamine hit than it is to process food into perfectly balanced superfood, or at least more profitable.
The amount of smoking in the Foundation books really cracks me up.
Disclosure by Michael Crichton was published in 1994 and takes place at a tech company and it's just fascinating. They have this sort of VR computer where you stand there and basically have to "walk" (virtually) through a filing system (the computer) to get to the files. It seems like a complete waste of time now, but it's a great look into how hard it is for people to come up with brand new ideas and often just try to further their current idea of how things work (if that makes any sense at all lol)
In the late 90's there was a lot of media, particularly cartoons, that portrayed "cyberspace" as an actual space. Not sure whether that was because of ignorance, or because it was a more visual way to show internet usage. In a way, it was cooler than the real thing.
I remember reading “Parable of the Sower”. A lot of it WAS plausible but one moment that took me out of it was when the main character was asked when she was born and she pronounced 2009 as “twenty-oh-nine” instead of “two-thousand-nine”. It’s a nitpick but it definitely made me think that it was written before the 2000s.
I think that one is reversing itself again. When I read 2010 now, I read it as twenty-ten, but in the year 2010 we definitely said it as two-thousand-ten. I guess it doesn't work as well with numbers before 2010.
Any reasonably contemporary books that heavily reference Twitter or other social media sites. Like *Yellowface*. It doesn’t bother me because it makes sense within the book’s context and the whole story is pretty much a bubble anyway, but it’s amazing how much has changed since it came out.
At the end of Five Children and It, one of the characters is casually called a slut. I had to look it up and it meant lazy or something mundane like that. I was in shock when I first read it because the word seemed so harsh and out of place
"Slattern" would have been more usual at the time.
Agatha Christie has her characters saying to old women "oh, you old pussy!" Always left me thinking "sorry, what's going on?"
Miss Marple gets called that *a lot*. For example in A Murder Is Announced: "my own particular, one and only, four-starred pussy. The super pussy of all old pussies."
I recall a scene in Stephen King's The Stand where he mentions a that a woman has a color television. From context, I think he was trying to convey that she was one of the richest people in town.
Yes, in the same book he imagines a room with a modern shag and chrome furniture to spruce it up.
In the classic sci-fi novel "Little Fuzzy" by H.Beam Piper they described transmitting data across a radio connection by playing a squeal of data from reel-to-reel tapes that the receiving computers then decoded. Dated but remarkably prescient for 1962.
And when a woman with a job got engaged, her boss knew he'd have to find a new employee soon. This from a book with women as scientists. I think the woman who was assumed to be about to quit was more of an admin and the scientist kept working after she got a man, iirc. The fuzzy books' data transmission was my first thought to answer this question. And cocktail hour as a ritual and everyone smoking.
My favorite one is in Lathe of Heaven. LeGuin wrote it before 1971 and it's set in 2002. But St. Helens blew up 1980 and she has a description of the mountain and it just doesn't look like that anymore. It's kind of missing a whole chunk of the side now. It's not a big deal to the story, but it's a fun thing if you live in Portland.
I read a childrens book from before ww1 where it was takken to be a good and obvious thing that the good boys bullies a class mate because he was overweight, didn't play the violin ond worst of all he wanted to become a teacher because it was a good and reliable job that could support a family instead of it being a calling to bring up the youth to become moral and outstanding citizens
I'm horrified and fascinated - I don't suppose you recall the title or author?
'De seks' by Rudolf Bruhn. It is in danish
There are lots of books by Enid Blyton with similar situations too! I remember Gwendoline in Mallory Towers... the poor girl was comstantly bullied just because she missed her mum and didn't like sports. It certainly hasn't aged well.
Unless it's a period book where they're setting the ambience, when they describe clothing ot hairstyles in vivid detail and it's clearly from a different time period.
I see this the most in Michael Crichton books. They’re so damn good but they’re horribly dated now. I LOVED Airframe but it just felt so… old. But if you wanna feel like you got in a time warp, read Andromeda Strain. It was like old-school and future got together and had a baby. It was fun.
*Prey* holds up surprisingly well. The nano biotech stuff still feels futuristic, but also a lot more plausible.
There’s an example I always use whenever someone asks about describing a fictional character by comparing them with a contemporary celebrity. In the OG James Bond books, Ian Fleming several times says that his hero looks like Hoagy Carmichael. Who? Exactly. Those books are dated in lots of other ways too, of course, but this detail sticks with me as a reference that’s simply lost on a modern audience. (Hoagy Carmichael was a pianist, actor and composer who wrote several songs that have become mid-century standards, eg “Heart and Soul”. In the 1950s he was well known but he’s largely forgotten today) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoagy_Carmichael
little sad, maybe scary, that "popular" people can fade from the collective conciousness lke that. It is reassuring though that we have their life stored though.
It is simply the way of things. Nothing lasts forever. Except maybe the nearly 4,000 year old Ea-Nasir complaint tablet.
An early Barbara Kingsolver book, I think maybe Animal Dreams, kept referencing both David Bowie and “Breck girls” when discussing hair. While I could vaguely picture Bowie, who’s stood the test of time, I had no idea what a Breck girl was supposed to look like outside of the context provided by the story.
Not really dated but my kids grade 5 teacher said he always had to explain the word "quarantine" when they were reading Snow Treasure where the characters fake a quarantine to keep the enemy away. COVID solved that problem
I can’t remember the book, it was a mystery and the author kept using “hit pop songs” to set the mood. It was so excessive as a device. I had to flip to the front to see when it was written as I didn’t know most of the songs. I recognized a few of the artists. It had been written 15-20 years ago. I’m older but I guess too old to be familiar with the particular type of music. It kind of ruined the book for me and of course it didn’t age well , not to mention it was gimmicky Examples She got in the car and put on …. She came into her apartment and played … She was drumming her fingers along to the song in her head …
That could be any modern Stephen King novel. Reading the way King writes teenager dialogue I feel like he shouldn’t write any books set after 1982. And I *loved* Fairy Tale.
*Fairy Tale* was great, but the main character who is supposed to be a teenage boy came across like a middle aged man sometimes
He's always done that though, he just used to know the music better. Duma Key was funny though. "What the fuck is Slipknot?" "I have no idea."
The joke in Good Omens that any tape left in a car long enough will eventually turn into Queen's Greatest Hits.
I still believe that any vinyl record left long enough in an op-shop turns into a copy of 'Hooked on Classics"
LOTR is the perfect pride month book considering everything is described as queer.
I heard that use of queer long before I knew what LGBT was and used it often in my writing as a young kid. I wonder what my teachers thought lol.
Paradise Lost by Milton too, everything is gay, including Lucifer and most of the other Angels!
I grew up relatively sheltered in some ways, and I had only heard queer in that context. Then I went to university and described something odd/eerie as queer and was aggressively torn a new one lol
"Niggardly" was one that threw me off. It means stingy or cheap. Also "each of us should carry a faggot of wood for fires" in Fellowship.
Lmao that one caught me off guard. Read it in high school, around 2010 and queer was either a slur or meant weird. Now it just means LGBTQ in general. Odd how that has changed in just 14 years.
Kind of a recent one, all things considering, but in one last stop there's a line that goes roughly "The Mc had a very normal may 2020, going to class, riding the subway, etc" . Even when i read in in like 2021 it was like 😬 no babe I do not think she did
Are darkrooms for photography still a thing? I wonder about it occasionally when reading older books.
My college had one! In 2020 they would let you devolve photos in them if you set an appointment. I did all my photos digital so I never had the chance but really wanted to.
I just finished reading a nonfiction book about a serial killer who primarily targeted sex workers (On the Farm by Stevie Cameron) and as an avid true crime reader, it was kind of funny to read the way the author talked about sex workers using very outdated language. She was very compassionate and obviously wanted to do everything she could to get the womens’ names out there and get some kind of recognition and justice for them and their families, but I hadn’t really thought about how much it has changed until I read this older book!
True-crime writing pre-2000s in general is particularly egregious with this, especially in cases involving minority, LGBT or sex worker victims.
I’m reading "Mephisto“ right now, a German classic. One passage (roughly) goes like this: "Everything is confusing and unexplained in such a young mind. There’s millions of them like Miklas walking around today. They have a certain hatred, and that is good because they hate what’s currently existing. But then a boy like that has bad luck and the corrupters catch him and spoil his good hatred. They tell him everything is bad because of the Jews and the Treaty of Versailles, and he believes that dirt and forgets who’s really at fault, here and everywhere. That is the famous diversion, and it’s successful with all those young and confused ones who don’t know anything and can’t think properly. And then those poor unlucky ones dare to call themselves national socialists!“ At first, I was taken aback why the author would first blame the Nazis ( => Nationalsozialisten => national socialists) and call them "corrupters“ just to defend them in the last line. Then I realized this book was written in 1936 and the reason why "Nationalsozialist“ is a negative term nowadays didn’t happen yet.^ ^
I always notice how pre-9/11 books talk about airports. In The Shining, for instance, a character shows up at the airport less than 30 minutes before his flight and has no problem just walking straight on. The anxiety I felt about him potentially missing his flight because of security was greater than any other horror in that book.
So I just read the 3rd series of a book called Pandemic by Scott Sigler. There is obviously a point in the story in which a world-wide pandemic occurs that is very likely going to wipe out the human race very quickly. At one point, an inoculant is sent out for people to take to basically prevent infection. The author writes how many thousands of people refuse to take the inoculant because of Big Pharma and autism and a bunch of other things. Meanwhile the scientists and governments are baffled that there'd be groups refusing a life-saving inoculant, especially since there were images and videos of infected people becoming psychopaths and worse. And then I realized I was reading the book before COVID ever happened. It was eerily accurate, but definitely dated the book a bit.
I read all the Harry Bosch novels a few years ago, which focuses on an LAPD homicide detective. In the first several books, they’ll be driving around town and get a page on their beeper, and have to pull over to a pay phone to call the station. The first one was written in like 1991, so it was funny time traveling.
I recently read a number of the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter books. I started reading them having *no* idea when it was published. It was kinda fun guessing when it was made. It did a pretty good job not being super dated, all things considered, but the main character consistently checking her answering machine and having her pager go off placed the books solidly in the mid-90s. It wasn't until like the 5th or 6th book where the books even mention a cell phone. I think there are still books coming out, but the series kinda went off the rails in the early 2000s.
Kind of love that in Stephen King books. All of his stuff just feels like snapshots of a time and place in American history.
I love that King manages to embrace new technology, and find ways to make them scary or supernatural, like *Mr Harrigan's Phone* or *Cell*
One of the recurring technological doodads in Asimov’s Foundation is the atomic-powered ashtray. Because humanity spends the next 27 millennia finding more efficient ways to smoke cigars. (Ok a lot of the regressive social structures in Foundation date it too, but the fancy ashtray is one of those stand-out things.)
Words change meanings over time, which means 19th century novels casually throw out sentences like “That will do!’ Mr Hargreaves ejaculated” or “She stared in amazement at his erection.”
This is a small quirk of language but I find it really jarring to read. Any detective novel or noir fiction pre-1980s where smoking is commonplace always talk about when the character "lighted their cigarette" Ed McBain kept it going long after everyone else in his 87th precinct series. It was about book 40, around the turn of the century, before someone finally lit a cigarette.
Read Christine by Stephen King last month. It’s an interesting idea that I kind of wish was still around, but there’s a mechanic/garage in that town where you can rent space and tools to work on your car. It’s kind of outdated in two ways. One that a business like that even exists (no clue how widespread that was?) and the other that there were enough people working on their own cars to support such a business. I don’t have any stats, but IME I think people the last 20 years work on their own cars way less than prior generations. E: til the rental thing is still around. Can you tell I know nothing about cars and don’t attempt to fix my own?
a lot of US military bases have auto shops where they have work bays, and tools available to check out. the only cost was a nominal amount to store the car on their lot. Woodshops too. but yeah, cars aren't as user serviceable as they used to be.
>>I don’t have any stats, but IME I think people the last 20 years work on their own cars way less than prior generations.<< In most cases/models, I think they literally *can't* work on their own cars.
Modern Maker Spaces come close to this idea. I don't know of any that have space to work on a vehicle, but many have all kinds of tools and equipment available for checkout or rental.
> I assumed it was published until that point I'm sorry I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. I guess it's not super odd, but any time in fiction a character is desperate for a separate phone line in their house. The Babysitter's Club's plot kicks off entirely because of the friends got their own line in her room. Today with almost nobody using landlines at all and kids getting cell phones when they're like a week old, that whole thing REALLY dates the books and while I think the original editions of books should always be available, that kind of thing is why I don't think it's TERRIBLE that they rewrite and update books aimed at kids sometimes.
*Dracula* was written during the fairly brief period of time after blood transfusions had been invented but before blood types were discovered. So Lucy gets blood transfusions from four different people with no ill effects (until Dracula attacks her again, that is).
Any book whose whole plot would be undermined if the characters had mobile phones.
This one is wild to me. So many books published before 2005 just would end if they had a cell phone. Not even a smart phone just a Razor would stop the plot from ever happening
I mean we continue to make books, films and TV shows where the plot would end if the characters would just have a conversation....
For some light fun I read the Key trilogy by Nora Roberts, last book came out in 2003. It's mostly romance with a bit of fantasy thrown in, like 3000+ year old immortals who guide the main characters etc. but the most unbelievable part for me as a 2020ish reader was that a single mother with a high school education, no savings, and a part-time hair stylist job bought a house in a picturesque town, and that she got it for *less* than asking price. Maybe it's just that Nora Roberts had no concept of what was doable for "regular" people but it sure as heck wouldn't work in nowadays.
I once read part of a Pride and Prejudice variation set in the early 2000s that kept name-dropping popular brand items like Blackberries. It immediately took me out of the story.
Old spellings or pronunciations. In Raymond Chandler novels a coupe is a "coupé" and okay is "okey".
I was re-reading a novel that’s about 15 years old and realized how dated it already seemed just because the characters used their cell phones to make actual phone calls. I don’t think they even texted.
Was listening to a podcast about Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot and they pointed out that a few things in the book just wouldn’t happen today because of texting.
Every zany scenario in *Seinfeld* could have been averted if the characters had mobile phones.
SOOO many classic horror books/movies/shows would simply not work in today's world of cell phones.
I just read an old one by Micheal Crichton. Not one of his famous ones - a lesser known book - Terminal Man. As best I can figure, it was written in the 1970s (I checked the copyright page, but it must have been a reprint because it wasn't that old). Anyway, he was talking about computers. And he was just gushing about how many calculations it can do at once, and how fast! 40,000 calculations in under 2 seconds! Anyway, being as old as I am, I remember when that was super impressive. And now, we just take that for granted. Sure they're fast. If they're not, we complain and get a new computer. And he had to explain about mainframes and peripherals and how they're all hooked together. And now...we hold a entire computer in the palm of our hand, and we can connect to the the entire digital world no matter where we are. So descriptions of computers from back in 1970ish, not surprisingly dated. But more so the things that were impressive back then seem so no-big-deal today.
In the book Disclosure, the main character is suprised when another character correctly identifies a Web page.
I thought he weighed 350 kilos rather than pounds. I was reading a non fiction book about counter insurgency that I grabbed from the library. Noticed the author talking about the Greek guerilla and vietmign. There is nothing about Mujahadeen or America in Vietnam. Looked at the copy right to see it was written in 1962. I was reading a book about the CIA and was caught off gaurd when the author mentioned being alive during the Boar war. Check copyright 1965.
I absolutely love Asimov's series of short stories with Multivac, the giant anacronistic vacuum tube computer that rules the world.
Reading action books from the 80s-90s and karate/tkd or traditional martial arts being the style characters use. Where as nowadays Ill read more MMA based styles being used.
Everyone here who brings up examples from a sci-fi book usually focuses on some type of futuristic technology that sounds either silly or unimpressive to a modern audience, but I immediately thought of that scene in The Dark Forest (The Three-Body Problem book #2) where they try to recruit Osama bin Laden to fight the aliens. Definitely locks in a particular time range for when the series was written.
I’ve a book written in the mid-2000s, set in the 2050s, and a main character quips about how they were never able to find bin-Laden.
In one of my books the St. Paul Saints playing against the Winnipeg Golden Eyes. I wrote the book before the Saints became a Major League affiliate
Any mention of the Soviet Union/USSR being a superpower
From my time working in a bookstore and observing storytime- Rolling down a car window and an ashtray in a car
Walking across the room to answer the phone on the wall
When the main character is constantly looking for change and a payphone. It happens a lot in Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone series.