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drploktaSo far, Blackout, Connie Willis's first novel in eight years, is rather irritating.
(There are probably some very minor spoilers in this.)
It's a direct sequel to her 1992 Hugo winner Doomsday Book, which I recall was also rather irritating.
The first problem is that while it's allegedly set in Oxford in 2060, it's actually set in the 1980s or thereabouts. All the characters are continually running round Oxford looking for each other, and/or receiving garbled messages, because no one has a mobile phone and no one has email (or at least, they don't use them). You could just about get away with this in a 1992 novel, but you certainly can't in a 2010 novel.
Second, she hasn't really done her research (again). Inability to use Victoria station wouldn't be much of an impediment to getting round London in 1940, when it was only on the District line and wasn't an interchange. There aren't any garter snakes in England. Nor is there any skunk cabbage. London is not laid out in blocks. Russell Square Tube station was involved in a terrorist incident in 2005, not 2006. No English person who's studied crosswords in the history of games could be unaware of the existence of cryptic crosswords, even in 2060. Charing Cross wasn't the right Tube station for Trafalgar Square in 1945, because it was what's now called Embankment. What's now called Charing Cross was two different stations called Trafalgar Square and Strand, and you'd have used one of those for Trafalgar Square.
Authors, if you're going to set a book in a country that you don't live in, try to get a native to read your book before it's published.
(There are probably some very minor spoilers in this.)
It's a direct sequel to her 1992 Hugo winner Doomsday Book, which I recall was also rather irritating.
The first problem is that while it's allegedly set in Oxford in 2060, it's actually set in the 1980s or thereabouts. All the characters are continually running round Oxford looking for each other, and/or receiving garbled messages, because no one has a mobile phone and no one has email (or at least, they don't use them). You could just about get away with this in a 1992 novel, but you certainly can't in a 2010 novel.
Second, she hasn't really done her research (again). Inability to use Victoria station wouldn't be much of an impediment to getting round London in 1940, when it was only on the District line and wasn't an interchange. There aren't any garter snakes in England. Nor is there any skunk cabbage. London is not laid out in blocks. Russell Square Tube station was involved in a terrorist incident in 2005, not 2006. No English person who's studied crosswords in the history of games could be unaware of the existence of cryptic crosswords, even in 2060. Charing Cross wasn't the right Tube station for Trafalgar Square in 1945, because it was what's now called Embankment. What's now called Charing Cross was two different stations called Trafalgar Square and Strand, and you'd have used one of those for Trafalgar Square.
Authors, if you're going to set a book in a country that you don't live in, try to get a native to read your book before it's published.
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Date: 2010-02-18 09:05 pm (UTC)I would expect that if cell phones per se turn out to be dangerous, then some other less-dangerous technology will come along to replace them. But yeah, good point about keeping continuity.
...My general feeling about all the phone-message stuff is that Willis loves screwball comedies, especially comedies of misunderstanding. It's a genre that unfortunately doesn't update well to the cell phone era. There are certainly people in the modern world who don't have cell phones, don't answer them, and/or ignore messages left on them, and there's always batteries running out, and lost phones, and mistakenly swapped phones, and inconvenient loss of signal, and so on, but that all starts to feel more and more contrived to me as the cell phone becomes more and more integrated into daily life.
But screwball comedies were often pretty contrived. So although the phone-message stuff in Willis's work (it pops up in her non-time-travel work too) has always bugged me a little (I generally don't really enjoy comedy-of-misunderstanding regardless of setting), I've usually tended to think of it as a genre convention.