Many of you reading this blog are doing so because you fancy yourself a writer, if not yet an author. While it is difficult to impart hard earned wisdom and to siphon off the insanity which occupies brain then rushes out from fingers to keyboard to prose, there are some mechanical things which could be imparted. Here we have a really good topic and a great example.
Harry Potter’s son departing on Hogwarts Express at Kings Cross
Unless you live under a rock in a country which has neither electricity nor television (North Korea?) you’ve all seen this scene. When Harry Potter’s son boards the Hogwarts Express for the very first time. It had a date. September 1, 2017 at 11 a.m.
In fiction it is very safe to choose a future date for a future fictional event which everybody believes to be fiction. This allows your fan base to plan a future event remembering your work while stoking their own fervor. Let us not forget that Marty McFly, he did lie, but only off by a year. In Marty’s defense, nobody believed the Cubs would ever win a World Series when that movie came out. After a change of ownership and a bunch of money being poured in, Chicagoans started treating it as a prediction, not a joke.
When I released “John Smith – Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars” as well as “Lesedi – The Greatest Lie Ever Told” many people criticized the choice of November 12, 2013 because the date wasn’t that far into the future by the time the book went to press. In fact, here is a quote from one reviewer:
Also, the apocalypse was set in 2013… very strange to date your novel that way and give it no shelf life.
You can find that review on GoodReads, just look for Micheal Long, if you care to read it or think I make this stuff up. I generally find people who say that about the book didn’t actually _read_ the book. While my view may be biased, I thought I did a pretty good job of hanging a lantern on it.
SK: Well, if everybody knew about it, then it surely didn’t happen.
JS: Not in 1984, no. The final vehicle for control wasn’t chosen until the early 1990s and it took a while to roll out globally. Sometime during 2010, the governments around the world achieved 95 percent of what they wanted. The vast majority of citizens carried with them a 24-hour monitoring device, which could be accessed remotely and would, via GPS, give a complete picture of their travels. Each one had a unique ID. Best of all, the devices were marketed in such a way as to make people think they were nothing unless they had one and kept it with them at all times.
When it became apparent that some portions of society simply couldn’t afford the devices—yes, each citizen paid for their own, and gladly…they even paid to customize them—most governments came up with some kind of ministry or program to ensure each and every person falling into the “cannot afford” category was issued one under some plausible story as “medical need” or “neighborhood watch.” This removed the poor-person-rejection-of-charity problem. Nobody felt insulted to receive the devices, since the devices allowed them to communicate with anyone at any time, as long as they knew the other person’s unique ID.SK: Do you honestly expect me to believe that everybody stood in line to get a unique ID for the government to monitor them 24 hours per day, seven days per week?
JS: No. They didn’t see it like that. They stood in line to get the latest and greatest cellphone with video camera, GPS, speaker phone, Internet access, and every other buzz phrase marketing could think of. If you don’t know what any of that is, it doesn’t matter. All you need to know is the more applications, called apps, it had, the more people wanted it.
There were many reasons for choosing that date at the time, none of which I care to remember or go into now, but one of the reasons should have appealed to those with even a mild numbers fetish.
- Lesedi ends the evening before November 12, 2013 – 11/12/13
- John Smith says the apocalypse happened November 13, 2013 – 11/13/13
- At some point I will write the final book about John Smith and it will be titled – 13/13/13
November 12, 2013 was a future date 11/12/13. It was also just shy of one year after the Mayan Calendar supposed world ending date (we didn’t actually know they were wrong while I wrote John Smith.) What? You are going to point out that 13/13/13 isn’t a valid date? Depends on your calendar. A writer can make any reality plausible. Have you forgotten that John Smith lives in a world without a Catholic church and while some old printed calendars may have survived, the survivors don’t know it was created by Pope Gregory XIII and today we call it the Gregorian Calendar.
Odd that a church which gave us the Less Than Great Crusades and The Spanish Inquisition to suppress scientific knowledge and discovery would give us an almost serviceable calendar. Of course those in various scientific communities will point out that dark matter is causing the universe to ever expand and that solar systems tend to get farther apart such that it will, eventually, take 13 months for the Earth to go around the sun.
I won’t sit here and tell you that I understand the science behind it. I’m a software geek. Something about dark matter pushing things out and the sun losing its pull as it burns its fuel providing us light. Trust me, I’m not going to dig that deep into it. I’ve heard and seen the things which make a case for Earth’s orbit moving out to where Mars is now (or very close to it) while other planets move out as well.
Light Switches
Having said all of that, in a hundred years it all might not matter. There was much chatter when Stephen Hawking predicted humans had 100 years to find a new planet. Myself and a few others think he was a bit generous. Tipping points are like the old fashioned light switches. Once you get past the curve of the unseen springy metal part, they jump all the way over. There is no pulling back just a little bit to keep things going. But, climate change isn’t going to kill us.
Oh, I believe climate change is real. I also believe Al Gore committed criminal fraud weeding out both scientists and data which didn’t support his predetermined conclusion. I also don’t care what Big Oil and the current administration says, I want to drive a full sized Jeep which gets 65 MPG (or better) and feels like it has just as much power as my high output 4.7 liter gas guzzling V8. Doesn’t everyone? No matter what you drive or how much you love it, if you have to pull up to the pump more than once per month, for that 10 minutes or so, you hate it. If the tank holds north of 20 Gallon you __really__ heat it.
Quite honestly I believe we (okay, officials in numerous countries, not so much “we”) are stupid enough to start nuking each other. Despite 2 great “War Games” movies, we have allowed the most clueless of our species (MBAs) to make decisions, therefore we are the architects of our own doom.
When it comes to dates, people pay far too much attention to them. They are generally based on a sequence of events occurring at a certain speed. When you are reading Dystopian/predictive fiction, pay far less attention to the predicted date than the sequence of events.
In a Post-Snowden world does anyone really believe “1984” hasn’t happened?