That's So Dated

veasleyd1 · Joined: 02 Dec 2007 Posts: 2064

As a kind of addendum to this topic, we should perhaps mention the very funny phenomenon of the "dated futuristic."

In the mid-1990s, Jayne Ann Krentz, writing as Jayne Castle, wrote three connected futuristics called Amaryllis, Zinnia, and Orchid. They had a future setting, paranormal powers, and the idea of a human colony "now" cut off from earth for hundreds of years which had been forced by local conditions to abandon earth technology and develop a new one.

The stated premise was that the original settlers ("Founders") had been from the Pacific Northwest.

The result was that, aside from the premise that the culture's nearly-indissoluble marriages were almost entirely arranged by professional matchmaking agencies, the culture of young professionals in mid-1990s Seattle, from trendy coffee bars to turns of phrase, found itself transplanted, having apparently survived not only the decades from then to the undefined "whenever" at which the colonists departed earth, but a couple of centuries of subsequent cultural trauma, essentially unchanged.

It's fascinating. I'll have to look up her other futuristic series and see if it does the same thing.

lijakaca · Joined: 28 Mar 2007 Posts: 341

Cora · Joined: 12 Mar 2008 Posts: 1088 Location: Bremen, Germany

Mark · Joined: 22 Mar 2007 Posts: 1240

I wouldn’t call the Castle “Curtain” books (Psynergy trilogy & more books set on Harmony) “dated” futuristics so much as “nominal” futuristics. The settings are superficially other planets at times in our future, but they are really variations on themes of our present world and culture. I’ve never asked the author her intent, but I view them as an extension of alternate history. I think she wanted a society much like ours with the exception of widespread acceptance and use of psychic abilities, so she came up with the Curtain universe. It lets her play with variations on our world that would stretch plausibility in an alternate history framework—widespread psionics and minor cultural variations in societies otherwise very much like ours.
I would reserve the term “dated” for what I usually call superseded history. Examples include Heinlein’s future history with the road cities and private development of the Moon, Simak’s City with personal helicopters, Pournelle’s CoDominion universe with a history including an alliance between the USA and USSR, or any other SF that includes events dated after the writing but before our present that have not happened in our history. Even Weber’s The Apocalypse Troll, which I really enjoy, is either now dated or about to become dated because the year is very close to now (I would have to pull the book to check for exact dates).
The psy-changeling stories by Nalini Singh are a different variation—futuristics from an altered history. The setting is in the future, but not “our” future, because there are references to events well before our present that are not part of our history.