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Comment by dfan | Hacker News Reader

Science fiction futures exist in a two-dimensional space; one axis is the time the story is set in, and the other axis is the time the story is written. You just have to get used to the fact that "2000 as written in 1950" is different from "2000 as written in 1990".

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There's an xkcd (sorry, but I promise it's relevant) that graphs something similar to this[0] but using 'number of years from the time the story was written' as the second axis. If you look at it you can see a line indicating 'stories set in 2015' at the top of the graph - it would be interesting to plot a series of these isochronology lines and compare the stories that lie on them, although for SF you probably need more detail at the top right...

0. https://xkcd.com/1491/

Honestly, I find it very refreshing to read SF from different decades — if only to occasionally get away from the dystopias of today's tomorrow.

Sure, space rockets with paper printouts (Heinlein's juvenile bildungsroman Starman Jones) may seem silly today, but I find that it adds to the flavor of yesterday's tomorrows.

And there is still a lot of paper used on the space station in the form of manuals. You need documentation that you absolutely, positively can always read, regardless of whether your computers go down from cosmic rays, electricity goes out, etc.

John Clute calls the "as written in" year the Real Year of a science fiction book. It's quite an interesting concept when you start thinking in terms of it.

I like seeing 20xy from the view of 19ab. It’s informative in a way and sometimes we have stuff they wanted!

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