Question about technology and other advancements that date your story

Pick an era and write to it.

And if it's future tech, just make it interesting. One can only predict a short distance into the future and it's getting shorter every year.

One of the biggest misses in sci-fi from the 50s is that everyone smokes in their spaceships.

One reason I decided to write my sci-fi in the near future is because predicting technology a thousand years out is impossible.

Just because you can use Uber doesn't mean people don't hail cabs. Uber isn't everyplace, and even places it is, people still hail cabs all day long.

Just because someone could send a text doesn't mean they will.

You can also try not being super specific about certain things that don't really affect the story. For example, instead of saying they couldn't get a cab or worrying about Uber, you could just say they tried to get a car, they tried to get a driver, something like that, and the universe said, "Uh, no. Not tonight."

I cheated. I set mine at some indeterminate point in the future and I made it post-apocalyptic, so most of the electronic gadgets have become expensive paperweights, because with the grid down, good luck charging stuff.

My husband (co-author) and I have run into that problem a number of times with the world our YA Dystopia is set in. The characters come from a world similar to ours, so we try to keep that relevant. Problem is, the story is set in the future, and tech keeps advancing while we're writing it. At one point we mentioned then device a character was holding to be a "datapad." Then tablets became popular. So we called it a "tablet." Then, before we knew it, everyone was doing the stuff they would do on a tablet on a smart phone. We eventually decided to mix and match. Some characters have phones. Some have tablets. In all fairness, it probably won't be either by the time the future comes around. But hey, the story is set in a world with super powers and a bunch of evil villains, so things are bound to change, right? Right? *Shifty eyes.*

For your story, maybe you could go with a generic taxi-like service, or if you want to specify one or the other, play on the time period. Maybe you can make it obvious that they're in a specific era, that way it's one of the "rules of the world" rather than an out-dated reference?

YA-age characters might not have the latest tech for all kinds of reasons: the family can only afford the cheap talk-only phone, the character is grounded, they or their parents object to handheld electronic devices on principle, so on.

Granted, it'd be weird if nobody in the book had so much as an iPod, but if all you need is to keep the main characters in trouble...

Modern advancements has actually been kind of a boon for my story, at least in a small way. Music plays a moderately large role in my story, and having the main characters have access to a music platform like Spotify—where you can listen to just about any song you want on demand—has made my life easier in a few scenes.

I can easily see how it could swing the other way and cause you problems though.

Don't get hung up on technology. If you have a compelling story, nobody will notice they could take other avenues for communication. His phone could be dead when he leaves the bar, or he isn't on Uber, or he doesn't even know where his phone is and is looking for a cab.

Noir/Blanc said:

I don't know how to ask this, but how do you handle advancements in technology as you're writing and revising your story? Technology can change how conflict happens or doesn't happen. For example I have two characters who leave a bar together to hail a cab.

Click to expand...

Set it in London and have them trying to get a cab to Brixton at 3am. There's this taxi-repelling barrier in London, called "The River Thames" which cab drivers will not drive through late at night. I don't believe that Uber have managed to break the Thames at night barrier. If they have, I'd want to see hard evidence thereof.


On a more serious note... just find some way to throw in the year that it's set so people don't think "duh, send a text/call uber!". It really doesn't matter that the story's dated. Lots of classics from the past are dated and people still love them. Harry Potter's dated in that there are no smartphones or the internet - how many people cared about that?

You can't entirely avoid dating your novel, but you can make the possible date range larger by sticking to things that have been around for some time and are likely to be around for some time more. In this case, that thing is your average taxi service. Taxis aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Uber is very new and could be gone in a few years, so using it is far more likely to date the novel.

If your concern is that someone with a phone would follow up the failed attempt by calling/texting the taxi company... just have no signal in that area. That happens to people so often they're not going to think about it.

In one book I read, the only thing that really made it obvious it was older was a mention of playing on a console that is no longer available. Had the book avoided that brand name mention, I wouldn't really have noticed. Sure, no one had a mobile phone and the internet wasn't mentioned, but the absence of something is less glaring than the presence of something dated. If Uber turns out to last a hundred years and you didn't mention it, that won't really show. But if it doesn't last and you mentioned it, that will be noticeable.

I don't think it matters at all, tbh. I've never used Uber, and will call a cab company instead. Part of it boils down to trust, and part of it boils down to being too lazy to download a new app, when the cab company is already in my phonebook.

And if it does date your story? So what? I'm working on something that I've deliberately set in 2003, because I didn't want all my teenagers to have cell phones that would get them out of the situations I put them in. Why is deliberately setting something in a different era any different from setting it in 2016 and let it date itself? Frex, take the iPhone. A lot of characters in a lot of books have iPhones, because it's a very recognisable phone. You say iPhone, and people know, more or less, what it looks like. The design hasn't changed very much since the iPhone was still an iPod. But if you say Galaxy S7, fewer people are likely to be able to conjure up that image beyond just a generic smartphone. But if I publish a book today, and my main character takes his headphones out of his laptop and plugs them into his brand new iPhone, it will irrevokably date my story, because as of tomorrow, new iPhones can't do that. If you try to keep up with that kind of advancement, you'll never finish your story, because you'll be caught in endless rewrites to keep everything up to date. If the story is good and engaging, nobody reading five years from now is going to care that things aren't done that way anymore. I mean, would Jurassic Park have turned out any different if they were using Tesla's auto-pilot, instead of jeeps on a track? No.

And speaking of Jurassic Park, boy howdy have paeleontological discoveries advanced ever since that one was published. T-rex has feathers now, and the thing Crichton called the velociraptor is actually the utahraptor. Do I care when I'm reading that book, or watching the move? No. Because it's still good, and engaging.

My family generally does not buy new things until what we have is broken, breaking down, or no longer usable.

Except phones and electronics.


Nor do we and I trust Uber. Take a cab, a bus, train, or something more trustworthy.

Mine is set in 2011. The technology available at the time is set. When I went in to do re-writes, I started trying to update to current tech, and I naturally found that current tech kept outpacing me. I gave up.

The book takes place in NYC, the 10th anniversary of 9/11 gets a mention. That sets the year, and I just decided to keep it there. Besides, all my characters have birth dates and ages in my original notes. No sense changing those, too.

As a reader, this has never bothered me unless the references are to specific brand names. If the character is texting, it doesn't matter to me whether it's on an iPhone 7 or an indestructible Nokia. I hate brand names in a story, though, since those get dated quickly and sound salesy.

Plenty of people don't use Uber, for various reasons. There's no one piece of tech that's a be-all-end-all used by everyone. There are certainly things like texting that are basically universal, but there's plenty of technology you can work around simply by having your characters just not use it, either because of flat out choice or just money or the device you decide they have. There have been plenty of times where I just decided my main character couldn't afford to have a cell just because I needed/wanted texting out of the picture.