How many years in the future is your story set?

[asakiyume]

The novel that I'm inching forward on (more like millimetering forward on) is set in the future, and that's got me thinking about what does and doesn't change in the future, or, to put it another way, how far in the future you'd have to go before something had disappeared or was forgotten entirely. Tech is easy to lose--it can be lost in 20 years, if it's replaced by other things. (This may not seem like a loss, but it is: the skill to use anything is still a skill, even if it's an obsolete skill.)

But other things really stick around--like religions. Go back a thousand years, and the big players that we've got on the religious field today were still there. A THOUSAND YEARS.** And not nation-states, but senses of peoples--they're tenacious, too. Tribalism I guess is the negative-connotation word for this.

I think of this, because some of the things authors want to get rid of by setting novels in the future are things like particular religions or national/tribal identity. And the truth is, I can pretty much accept that, if the story catches me up. It's only when I look at history that I get to thinking about plausibility and implausibility.

**It's true that how religions or the sense of being a people manifest themselves change--flavors of Buddhism or Christianity in 1015 was a lot different from those flavors in 2015, and that leaves lots of room for fun imagination. But the actual thing itself doesn't just disappear. Even religions that are no longer actively practiced remain alive culturally.

Comments

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Get back beyond the Abrahamics though and religion becomes a thing of mystery and wonder.

It may explain why no one much sets anything in the Neolithic- so many strangenesses to deal with amongst the more knowable.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

What strangenesses are you thinking of?

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Not knowing what they were worshipping or what the stone circles were for- they literally hum with power and I'm not particularly sensitive to such things! Not knowing WHY sunlight can hit the back of a chambered tomb down the entry tunnel on one day a year, or why the old people buried their dead the way they did- in a foetal position.

We'll be back up in Orkney at the end of the week and I'll be back to wondering who these early people were...............

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

In a way, that makes them fertile ground for storytelling, since a person can imagine answers (though I like it best when people's imagination is guided by research).

How great that you will soon be back in the Orkneys!

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

It does make you realise how little we know about our earliest ancestors.

We're looking forward to it as we badly need a break!