Two fics, two days - both set in the early 1990s

[conuly]

Fic one: Protagonist very recently, like, last week, left home to live with a friend. Protagonist wonders how his newly estranged family found him, then reflects that "the internet still exists". Technically a true statement in 1994, however, it's perhaps a bit more likely that they just used the phone book.

Fic two: Protagonist is touristing in NYC, casually stops in a bodega, buys a flip phone so he can text people. Not in 1992 he didn't - texting via phones was only just invented that year and phones were bricks!

You gotta laugh. Kindly and gently, but still - you gotta laugh!

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This pasta sauce wants to record your family

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Comments

[kengr]

Reminds me of a story set in 1960. It had someone paying with a credit card, the same card, at several different stores.

As I pointed out to the author, back then there were charge plates which were a credit account at a *single* store/chain. They weren't usable at other stores.

True credit cards didn't come until much later.

Interesting (irrelevant) detail was that the charge plates were stamped metal.

[conuly]

And even those credit cards don't go back so far. Before that, if you had credit, it was a tab.

[kengr]

Another "period detail"is that in the 70s, if you took credit cards, you had to look them up in these books (the size of a phone book but only about half an inch thick) to see if the credit was canceled stolen.

If it was listed in the current book(s) and you accepted it, you were out the money. I was working as an assistant at Saturday Market, and well remember fumbling thru those tomes.

[cordjostler]

I occasionally get weirded out thinking about how many people in the world today don't know a pre-mobile internet reality. ..and then sometimes I have a hard time remembering what it was like.

[conuly]

It seems so different sometimes.

[moon_custafer]

I don’t usually spot any technological anachronisms that blatant in the fics I read. More often it’s a figure of speech that breaks setting for me—I might be wrong, but I don’t think people said “I wasn’t feeling him!” in the late 1960s, at least not to mean “I didn’t like him” or “he gave me the creeps.”

[goljerp]

Also, in 1992, you didn't buy a cell phone in a bodega. Unless you count B&H Photo as a "bodega", or one of the electronics stores in midtown. I'd believe that they might sell you a cell phone, but not a regular bodega, at least not in '92. Of course, I wasn't in NYC much in '92, but even in '99, cellphones were by no means ubiquitous in NYC, and that's when I moved there. And I'd been somewhere (abroad) where they were ubiquitous, so I knew the difference.

[siliconshaman]

Technology isn't the only thing people screw up... a character set in Holmesian Victorian London dismissed a noise in the bushes as "probably a possum". Um, no, not unless it was very lost.

[conuly]

Like all those weirdly South American kookaburras which perch in the jungle!

It goes in reverse too - I've seen actual, published books with hedgehogs in North America.

[siliconshaman]

Huh... I thought there is a species native to the Americas, and apparently there was, long ago.

Live and learn.

[conuly]

Long before humans, and porcupines are unrelated.

Research? We don't need no stinkin' research to write our fiction.

[cactuswatcher]

I remember a novel written about the pre-Columbian area near modern St. Louis where I lived for many years. The author talked about the prominent sandstone cliffs... No, the prominent cliffs, there along the Mississippi river, are white limestone. I have no idea how far away the nearest exposed sandstone is.

Kookaburras. I remember the kiddie TV series Jungle Jim starring Johnny Weismuller, that had Kookaburras sounding off in the background off in every action packed African adventure. We kids didn't know they didn't belong there, but somehow we did know they were (recorded) kookaburras.

Re: Research? We don't need no stinkin' research to write our fiction.

[watervole]

One of my pet hates is geology errors.

[sallymn]

I do suspect that when writing recent history (as in 80s and so on and doesn't writing that make me feel old) it is easier to make that wort of mistake because the changes see like they are smaller, or it seems... well, recent and therefore people don't think of stuff like cellphones, internet... or even smashed avocado (I have this book about Australia in the 70s and it's full of the tiny details we have forgotten were different then).

[ethelmay]

I vividly remember how awful it was to text on phones where you had to hit the 1 key three times to type C, and so on. That was only about 20 years ago (for me, anyway, I didn't have a smartphone for quite a while).

[conuly]

The correct and original use case for autofill.