Post by Jack BohnOne other helpful feature of explainxkcd.com is crosslinks to comics on similar thoughts.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2152:_Westerns
Is about Westerns as a genre lasting longer than the Wild West period.
There's a link to a post about the question whether the length of all
the movies about World War II adds up to more time than the war years.
This can be extended up and down. The Grandeur That Was Rome has
been talked about since folks realized Rome was grander than what was
around them. The Kennedy assassination footage takes longer to view
if they cover preparations and root causes, shouldn't our measure of
the Real Time of the event, too?
But back to the poplit Four Ages of Man: Ancient Egypt and Rome,
Camelot, the Wild West, and WWII. There is no genre of "Ohio in the
19-oughts." Are there any future histories where the timeline is
marked, or characters complain about eras too dull to talk about?
"May you live in interesting times." [1]
I've been feeling guilty about picking up this old thread only to
post thread drift, even if you personally pretty much demanded that
thread drift in later posts. So here's my try at your question.
First a bit of vocabulary. We need a generic noun for things like
"Ohio in the 19-oughts" [2] or "Athens during the Peloponnesian War".
I don't know of one, so I'm using "placetime" in this post, hoping to
be informed of a better term.
So here's how I understand your post: Certain placetimes get much
more than their fair share of attention. So other placetimes get
much *less* than their share. And you're asking about future
histories that either mark such times in their chronologies, or
have characters talk about them, which could range from:
"And during the 28th century..."
"Oh, please, not the 28th century again! Honestly, couldn't
you at least study something exciting, like the Buddhist War?"
to
"So people think of the 28th century as a boring time when the
top goings-on involved grass growing. But I'm telling you, if you
study those records right, there's a treasure map buried in them..."
These snatches of dialogue represent three purposes I can think of,
why an author would want her characters to talk about a placetime as
boring:
1. To add time depth. The first snatch contrasts two periods that
haven't happened yet. But there are easier and more useful ways
to add time depth.
2. To characterise. The first snatch makes the second speaker
look young or callow, or the first look old or geekish.
3. To fake you out. The second snatch makes this explicit, but if
I were going to write a novel that revolved around the absolutely
epochal secret deeds determining all future history that were done
in Ohio in the 19-oughts (wait, didn't Michael Flynn already write
that?), I would certainly use the first snatch instead.
Anyway, neither snatch is all that memorable in its own right, so I'm
not surprised nobody's given you actual examples. However, I've read
a bunch of future-set novels that one way or another reflect on what
makes a placetime boring or interesting, or historical or unworthy of
history - usually with the implication that the placetime *within
which the novel is set* is boring and unworthy by some standard, with
which the novel may agree or disagree. (As opposed to your wish that
the boring placetimes be in the novel's past.)
<Watch the North Wind Rise> = <Seven Days in New Crete>, Robert
Graves, 1949
<Always Coming Home>, Ursula Le Guin, 1985
<Child of Fortune>, Norman Spinrad, 1985
<Pacific Edge>, Kim Stanley Robinson, 1990
and whatever I've read of Jack McDevitt's Alex Benedict series.
Before I remembered these I remembered my go-to books for "Boring?
Ha!", which are all by women, and fantasy, past-set, or both:
<Greenwillow>, B. J. Chute, 1956
<Malafrena>, Ursula Le Guin, 1979
the historicals of Gillian Bradshaw, most of which focus on less
prominent placetimes; examples with fantasy elements, from most to
least of those, are:
<The Wolf Hunt>, 2001 (Brittany, 12th century AD)
<Horses of Heaven>, 1991 (Ferghana valley, 2nd century BC)
<Island of Ghosts>, 1998 (northern England, 2nd century AD)
<Lifelode>, Jo Walton, 2009
I suppose A. S. Byatt's <Possession>, 1990, bears on this in its own
way too. So, differently, does Sean Stewart's <Nobody's Son>, 1993.
I also remembered my own belief, which is that no matter how boring
everyone thinks history is, in reality *human history properly known
and understood is intrinsically interesting*. In this regard I'm
like the diehard Marxist who insists that none of the historical
Communist dictatorships was an adequate test of Marxist theory. I'm
pretty sure nobody here wants me to go into detail about this. But
I'll still venture to point out that the US presidents at the start
and end of the 19-oughts both came from Ohio.
Joe Bernstein
[1] According to
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times>
this ancient Chinese curse was actually coined by some member or
other of the British Chamberlain family - yes, that one - in the
early 20th century.
[2] You've been informed of some fiction set in Ohio in the 19-oughts,
but I wonder whether there is in fact a genre normatively set there.
Seems to me mainstream fiction of that decade was probably mostly
present-set, as usual, and there may have been a genre within that
which was typically set in anonymous Midwestern towns.
--
Joe Bernstein <***@gmail.com>