Dated

Astronaut in a fedora smoking a cigar inside a retro spaceship cockpit viewing a galaxy.

Dated

April 6, 2026

2–3 minutes

I was re-reading one of my favorite comfort reads – THE FAR COUNTRY – about Australia, set in the early 1950’s – and in part about a bleak UK, in throes of post-war socialism, rationing and, frankly, despair. The author – Neville Shute – plainly didn’t hold much hope of England pulling out of the nose-dive, particularly for the qualified and skilled. As we know, it did at least in part improve, although I think he’d be even more depressed about its present state.

One of the two main characters is, for want of a better word, a refugee – a Doctor, given a choice of his own country occupied by the USSR, or being a manual laborer in Australia… he chose the latter. I love the story, and it was no small part of the reason I came to Australia. But compared to attitudes and mores of today’s literature, it is very dated. The character, a refugee, is grateful for refuge, and feels he owes the refuge-country a great deal, and would be willing to go to war, for it. He feels a that he owes the country and its people, and he does his best to learn the local language and customs, to fit in with it. It would never find a Trad publisher now.

There are many other aspects that are very rooted in 1950 – attitudes, the characters all smoke. The role of women is largely domestic… etc. I still enjoy the story, I just know it is about 1950, just as a historical novel I expect to be correct for the time and attitudes of that time (a lot of readers do not. They’ve been brainwashed into yesterday’s heroes, living by the standards of their time being bad, so they want their historical to be modern attitudes from people from a different milieu. It irritates me no end).

That said, sf in particular suffers from ‘dating’ because the future is a lot closer to us than it was to the writers of 1960. Some their ‘futures’ are already our past, and I don’t have my flying car, and the sales of Soylent Green look less likely. Fantasy doesn’t date as easily because most of it quasi-historical anyway.

But what do you do to protect your stories from becoming dated rapidly (while you’re still around to care about the sales)?

7 responses to “Dated”

jaglionpress

April 6, 2026 at 8:36 am

Mostly i avoid writing about the future, because much smarter people than me have looked pretty dumb writing about it. IIRC, i put some indicators in the Space Egyptian books to indicate that they were probably taking place contemporaneous with now, just a long ways away among people who’d lost contact with earth and weren’t super interested in restoring it. The P&P in space book was liberating in some ways because although I did what I could to make it plausible, well, in two or three hundred years when the Kuiper Belt is settled, people will probably still be reading Jane Austen albeit in translation, and maybe even JAFF, but they won’t be reading 200-300 hundred year old JAFF.

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TXRed

April 6, 2026 at 10:24 am

Ah, yes, the slide rules in spaaaaaccceeeee stories. Which are still wildly fun, even if the technology didn’t quiet turn out the way Heinlein, Doc Smith, and many others envisioned.

For things that are set in present day, ish (urban fantasy), I try to use a minimum of slang and technology. A few characters smoke, but no one makes a big deal about it because “that’s just him.” Some of the characters are a bit anachronistic already, so as the stories age, readers will (I hope) chuckle and nod at the eccentrics without thinking too much about it.

For sci fi? A little extrapolation, especially in genetics, blending technology and low technology (colony world. Very low population density, with native things that like to eat any and every other native thing, and visitors). I can get away with personal jet aircraft, fusion generators, beam weapons, and animal-drawn vehicles. Thus far, no readers have complained or challenged that part. Sex roles are traditional, because of the characters’ religion, but the characters are competent in their spheres, so they balance.

Not that a truly determined activist wouldn’t find something to scream or have the vapors over, of course.

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1. Imaginos1892
  
  April 6, 2026 at 11:08 am
  
  Ah, yes, A.E. Van Vogt and the hundred-foot-long slide rules, or vacuum tubes the size of zeppelins. ‘Memory tubes’ in The Door Into Summer.
  
  Soylent Green was set in 2022.
  
  Reply
  1. Paul (Drak Bibliophile) Howard
    
    April 6, 2026 at 11:12 am
    
    To make thing “more fun” the Harrison novel was set in late 1999. [Crazy Grin]
    
    Reply
Frank

April 6, 2026 at 10:25 am

LOL! One way to future-proof your SF is to set it far enough in the future that it won’t get easily dated. Not as easy as it sounds. As it happens, my first novel was set in a futuristic Los Angeles. I began writing it in the late 70’s (before I got a real job). It features an LA where no one ever leaves their house, they all work over “the set” and get everything they use delivered by “the chute”. Then came 2021, and I felt it was more historical fiction than SF. I did have to change a few things. My original set was a CRT, and I had a character attempting to fix it by whacking it (remember those days?), instead of turning it off and on.

I still enjoy The Man Who Sold the Moon, despite Elon Musk having to change the playbook of selling his vision from D. D. Harriman’s 1950’s style cereal box and other ad campaigns to a more concrete Starlink global internet connection. Why do I now hear a Moody Blues album playing in my head (Days of Future Passed)? 🙂

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Celia Hayes

April 6, 2026 at 10:57 am

Honestly, this kind of thing doesn’t really come up in my books – as most of them are historical fiction set in the 19th century (the most recent is set in WWII) and I like to believe that I have a good handle on writing characters and dialog appropriate for those times and those various places. My one contemporary series is very firmly dated in the various six or seven years that I wrote it, in that there are occasional community newsletters with very definite dates.

The one aspect about that series that I did question briefly – was how many of my characters in it were military veterans (of various eras) but my daughter and I did a quick rundown of our immediate neighbors … and yes, the proportion of veterans to non-veterans was about par for Texas.

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Michael Morley

April 6, 2026 at 10:59 am

Writing stories set in the 1970s and 1980s, I have to do a different sort of future-proofing: making sure pop culture references, attitudes, and turns of phrase from later years don’t creep into the story.

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