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

[muuranker.livejournal.com]

In my current work, I think a lot about skills loss. If something was a wanted skill 50 years ago, and folks live to 3-score-years-and-ten, then you still have LOADs of people around, 40 years on, who learned the skill, even though it was declining, when they were aged 20, who are now only 60. By which time, it can have passed into a romanticised, gentile hobby. Or a differently romanticised, geeky hobby. Or hobby/bit of teaching / bit of well-it-is-an-artform income generation. The skills of making daguerreotypes (for example) is not lost.
I have friends who knap flints. Not to make flints for flintlock guns, but to make projectiles to kill animals (or capable of killing them) - friends who are living in the same country as friends who follow ancient religions (family never converted from Norse paganism, choice to follow Druidism). Skills are at least as persistent as religion, from what I've seen.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Good point. I actually wasn't trying to argue that the skills were going to be totally forgotten (though now I'm thinking maybe I kind of implied that), and certainly not irrecoverably, but just that they were going to be *largely* forgotten. What I was really trying to do was think about what things change fast and what things change slowly. Fashion changes fast, for instance. Clothing technology changes somewhat more slowly, but still pretty fast. But certain traditions change really slowly.

Not that there can't be exceptions, and not that a story needs to hew to that observation, necessarily. Just that it's worth noting that some things seem, generally, more change resistant than others.