5 ms·

This drives me nuts whenever I read anything by Connie Willis. Her time travel books play (partly, obviously) decades in the future yet there are constantly peo

by ugh 16y ago

This drives me nuts whenever I read anything by Connie Willis. Her time travel books play (partly, obviously) decades in the future yet there are constantly people running around and frantically looking for each other and not finding anyone. I always want to scream “Pick up your goddamn cellphone!” (Some of those were written in the nineties which explains their lack of cellphones but even her most recent books from this year have the same problem.)

teamonkey 16y ago
It's weird that the lack of portable phones requires more suspension of disbelief than time travel. Maybe that's a testament to the writer. In Doomsday Book there are a few plot points where even an answering machine would have helped. Excellent books though, despite that.
- trafficlight 16y ago
  It's not weird at all. If you have the technology to move your physical being between time periods, you can certainly move a few radio waves around.
mechanical_fish 16y ago
Pity the poor artist who establishes their reputation in one medium, then sees the medium do a big shift. Willis probably could write books which fully encompass the cellphone-era worldview. But will they be Connie Willis books? Or will the loss of all those old tropes make her new style inevitably different from her best-selling old style? Think of PG Wodehouse, blithely writing novels set in early-twentieth-century England as late as 1975. (Though this example is a bit contrived, since some would argue that Wodehouse wrote about a society that never existed.) Or Bach, plugging away on his late Baroque masterworks years after the Baroque went out of style.
- jonhendry 16y ago
  "(Though this example is a bit contrived, since some would argue that Wodehouse wrote about a society that never existed.) " Just think of the Drones club as a bunch of bun-tossing elves.
- lukev 16y ago
  On the other hand, I love both Wodehouse and Bach.
  - mechanical_fish 16y ago
    Of course! In fact, I just discovered that The Art of the Fugue, which I believe Bach wrote toward the end of his career, really does sound better to me than his earlier stuff. Good for him for plugging stubbornly on in the genre he had mastered and which he knew best.
    - indrax 16y ago
      Wait, are you telling me that he was retro before retro was cool?

by ugh 16y ago

teamonkey 16y ago

It's weird that the lack of portable phones requires more suspension of disbelief than time travel. Maybe that's a testament to the writer. In Doomsday Book there are a few plot points where even an answering machine would have helped. Excellent books though, despite that.

trafficlight 16y ago
It's not weird at all. If you have the technology to move your physical being between time periods, you can certainly move a few radio waves around.

mechanical_fish 16y ago

Pity the poor artist who establishes their reputation in one medium, then sees the medium do a big shift. Willis probably could write books which fully encompass the cellphone-era worldview. But will they be Connie Willis books? Or will the loss of all those old tropes make her new style inevitably different from her best-selling old style? Think of PG Wodehouse, blithely writing novels set in early-twentieth-century England as late as 1975. (Though this example is a bit contrived, since some would argue that Wodehouse wrote about a society that never existed.) Or Bach, plugging away on his late Baroque masterworks years after the Baroque went out of style.

jonhendry 16y ago
"(Though this example is a bit contrived, since some would argue that Wodehouse wrote about a society that never existed.) " Just think of the Drones club as a bunch of bun-tossing elves.
lukev 16y ago
On the other hand, I love both Wodehouse and Bach.
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  Of course! In fact, I just discovered that The Art of the Fugue, which I believe Bach wrote toward the end of his career, really does sound better to me than his earlier stuff. Good for him for plugging stubbornly on in the genre he had mastered and which he knew best.
  - indrax 16y ago
    Wait, are you telling me that he was retro before retro was cool?