I realize you say this somewhat in jest, but I want to respond to this because the first sentence of of William Gibson's _Neuromancer_ is paradoxically both timeless and time bound.

> The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

That first sentence characterizes the novel's diegetic (in-narrative) setting by giving the sky a property of an alternate medium (television). Unlike gentler rhetorical assertions such as simile, the declaration that the sky possessed a property of television suggests that the setting--like the intra-diegetic setting of the (Morrocan) beach in which an unnamed adversarial AI imprisons Case--is also a media construct in which the reader is imprisoned.

In other words, the media topology structuring the novel's outermost narrative is a recursive formation of one medium inside another medium and this structure is timeless. It's merely recursion.

However, fully understanding the literary (as opposed to narrative) significance of such a structuration depends upon knowing what television was and why any of its channels might be "dead" as opposed to "live".

A useful point of comparison can be found in William Shakespeare's _As You Like It_ (II.VII.139-143)

  All the world’s a stage,
  And all the men and women merely players;
  They have their exits and their entrances,
  And one man in his time plays many parts,
  His acts being seven ages. [. . .]

The significance is timeless, drawing power from the assertion that life is in fact lived on a stage. On the other hand, the description is also time bound (as well as culturally circumscribed) depending as it does on the greatly diminished (since Elizabethan England) medium of live performance.

EDIT: Fix predicate in first sentence. Formatting. Change "at" to "a" in penultimate sentence.