I’m in the middle of reading (actually listening to the Audible version) of Carl Hiaasen’s latest Florida Crime novel, Squeeze Me. I’ve been really looking forward to this one. I'm a huge fan of Hiaasen from way back. His novels are full of colorful characters, the kind of absurd events and crimes that could only be ripped from Florida headlines, and viciously sly and funny political and social satire.
It’s been a long time since he’s released a new adult novel (he’s had a string of YA novels that overlap his earlier adult work), so I was excited and thought I knew what to expect.
Well, mostly I did. Not that I’m not enjoying the book. I am, and as I said, I haven’t finished it yet, so this is no review. What struck me here is that this is the first novel I’ve read so far that is intended to be post-covid. It’s not set in the reader’s hypothetical present, as most contemporary novels are. Nor is is vaguely placed before the pandemic, or during it.
No, it’s set in a world post-pandemic. There are no masks in this novel, no shutdowns, no hand-sanitizer particularly. Yet it is definitely after the pandemic, as it is referenced at multiple points in the novel as something that recently happened, remembered, but not especially noteworthy compared to current events. Not so recently that people are still giddy from release, or thinking to themselves, “Boy, it’s great to go to a cocktail party again,” or “Hell, I sure missed getting to go to the Publix and fondle the peaches!” It’s set in the world where an unnamed president and first lady (unnamed, but undoubtedly based on Donald Trump and wife Melania) are still in the White House.
In fact, the president is likely in his second term, as a second, apparently unsuccessful, impeachment is mentioned. In fact, it seems most likely that the book takes place in 2021 or 2022. Maybe later, but if so, you’d think the upcoming election season would be on people’s minds.
I’ve seen countless posts about writing through the now-current Covid pandemic shutdown, posts that address writing through stress, depression and adversity. But I haven’t seen much about how to write contemporary fiction set relative to this adversity. I think it’s time we talk.
Since I was a child, I’ve written science fiction. I love big sf. Star Trek. Star Wars. Asimov’s robots and space empires. Big science and technology set far in the future, where you can (and most writers do) get to mostly wave-away the period between now and this distant then. It’s a great luxury, because it provides a huge buffer to cushion your work from reality and the advance of time.
The counter-intuitive fact is, it’s much more difficult to write near-future science fiction based on reality than far-future stuff full of magical warp drives and teleporters. Our history, society, and technology are evolving and changing at a breakneck pace. Try and write something five years in the future and you’ll almost certainly embarrass yourself when the calendar catches you with your story. Even ten or twenty is hard. Think of all those sf writers in the 80s writing about space colonies built in the 90s being visited by the fusion rockets of the year 2000, all still crewed by white guys and one too-smart-for-her-own-good sexy woman who talks big, but still makes coffee, gets leered at a lot, and mocked for her efforts to be a real astronaut, before falling in bed with Our Hero.
Neither technology, the politics of progress, or society went exactly as commonly expected. Arthur C. Clarke never wrote a book titled “2020: The Year We Wore Sweat-pants and Sat Through Zoom Meetings.” Nobody would have predicted that many of these old-guard writers would be posthumously roasted for their now-unacceptable sexist, racist, fascist, and moral crimes.
Okay, science fiction writers have always dealt with this kind of near-future uncertainty problem, though some have played fast and loose with it because they figure they have latitude explicitly because it is science fiction. If the major premise is vaguely credible and still holds up, say humanoid robots taking over the farming industry, people will forgive you if the cell phones aren’t implanted behind your ear like they started doing in 2030, or you’ve failed to mention the absurd fake-fur stole and loincloth craze for men of 2024.
But writers of contemporary fiction don’t get that pass, or at least not to the extent that writers of more fantastic fiction have, and many of them are going to now confront this problem for the very first time.
Let’s take a look at some of the major options available to writers working right now.
Set it in the past
Okay, I did say contemporary fiction. But it is just possible that your current contemporary work could be slid into the past, perhaps the 80s, or the 90s, or the 50s, or even the 2000s. Maybe this will open some new avenues of story for you. But if it doesn’t, if the story doesn’t somehow benefit from its temporal relocation, then it’s probably a mistake.
And of course, you could just set it “Just before the pandemic.” Maybe explicitly in 2019, or even early 2020. But I have a big caution to go with that. Even if you’re vague and avoid it, many readers are going to inevitably find themselves thinking things like, “If only this fool character knew what was coming in a few months, they’d relax and enjoy life more. They’d not delay that trip to Disney World. They wouldn’t invest all their money in expanding the family movie-theater chain. They’d get over old family arguments and hug their old grandma while they still can, and while they’re still alive!” You could possibly work this irony into the story, but controlling how these reactions express themselves in the mind of the reader, especially not knowing what the full context of a near-future reader’s mind is going to be. I’d hesitate to try it.
Set it During the Pandemic
In some ways this may seem like the most obvious choice. We are (as of this writing) in the pandemic. We know what’s going on. Or at least, we think we do. In times like this, history has a way of rapidly putting an unanticipated spin on current events. “Those fools don’t even suspect yet that Lady Gaga will win the 2020 presidential election with a write-in landslide orchestrated by dancing social-hackers on Tik Tok 2: The Sequel!”
And other problem is that it very firmly sets your book in a very specific time. The first problem is, I think there are going to be a lot of novels and stories set here, to the extent that while some may break out, people in general are going to be sick of them immediately. And also because it steals from the reader a few years from now the luxury of easily ignoring when the novel is set; and think of it as happening now, even if the cell phones are the wrong size, shape, and configuration, or that they just don’t understand how hot fake-fur stoles and loincloths for men are going to be for trend-setters this fall!
Normally, with contemporary fiction, you have a least a little latitude here. It’s still possible still to enjoy “The Black Echo,” Michael Connelly’s 1992 novel which establishes his detective Harry Bosch as having been a soldier in Viet Nam, no later than 1975, and possibly as early as 1965, a detective who is still just barely credible busting crime in LA as of 2019 (and presumably beyond).
Readers are willing to ignore the little things (and maybe some of the big ones) for a book that’s good enough, or a series that’s beloved enough. We all know that it would take a miracle for a guy without super-powers, like Bruce Wayne, to last more than five or ten years fighting crime on rooftops in a suit with limited visibility and a dangerous cape ( even assuming he didn’t get shot like a million times, or thrown in a vat of acid, or — have-his-back-broken…) but Batman is forever! (Hey, did you know that a lot of Marvel comics characters, besides Captain America, served in the military in WWII, including Ben Grimm and Reed Richards from the Fantastic Four AND Nick Fury? Sure, it’s all be retconned and rebooted out of continuity, but it happened. Also, Nick Fury used to be a white guy. And Nick Fury was once David Hasselhoff too, but that’s another post entirely.)
Set it After Covid
And this is the slightly uneasy place where the novel Squeeze Me falls. And I will acknowledge that, for most writers and most books, this is probably the best possible solution. But it too has many pitfalls, and Squeeze Me, even half-way through, has already staggered through several of them.
It’s tempting to think that, whenever this pandemic and shutdown ends, things will just reset to how it was, give-or-take a little, in 2019. Maybe it will be 2021. Maybe it will be 2023. Maybe the same US president will be in office. Maybe a different one. But politics aside, and the fact that there’s always a more expensive iPhone, maybe everyone will be still be talking about how Chris Pine showed up on the red carpet at the first post-Covid Hollywood premier wearing a stunning fake-mink stole and flaming orange Gucci loincloth that had everyone talking. But such minutiae aside, it won’t be that different from 2019. It will just be 2019 post-covid, that’s all. We’ll all have had our shots and life will be pretty much the same. But it won’t.
Any idiot can see this is one of those years where history diverges wildly. We could have a new president in the US starting in 2021. Or not. We could have a fascist state robbed of democracy. Or not. We could have a civil war started by angry losers. Or not. We could have a world-wide depression the likes of which we haven’t see since the 30s. Or a recession like the 70s. Or a euphoric mass party like the end of prohibition in the US, only world-wide in scale. Or, or, or.
At the very least, when we can, we’re going to stagger back into the world, maskless, blinking against the sunlight, free to mingle or touch, and feeling amazingly naked and inexplicably fearful. We will be different, every one of us. Except maybe for the people who, even then, will refuse to believe it all happened. And because everyone else changed around them, they still will be different.
So, you may think you know what will happen, what the world will be like. But you don’t. You may get away with claiming you know, and you may even guess and get credit for seeming right. But you still won’t know. That’s scary. But it’s a safer hill to die on that some, so you might want to try it.
To Carl Hiaasen’s credit, I have the feeling that this book was already finished, or perhaps at least well underway, when the pandemic and shutdown came, and that those occasional references to the pandemic times were added at the last minute. Given that it deals strongly with the current president, it was not the sort of book that could be much delayed in its publication. Almost certainly it will be quite readable in a few years. But to publish it then would be unthinkable.
So, Put the Book on Hold Until After Covid
And this, my friends, is the solution that is unthinkable, and that some people are going to do anyway. While I can’t tell you what to do with your book, it almost certainly shouldn’t be this. If you aren’t writing, you aren’t gaining anything, and you aren’t learning anything. And while the world around you may seem to be frozen in time, it is still moving rapidly along, and you don’t want to be left behind. Yes, there’s a risk your book could shortly be an anachronistic joke. But, most probably it won’t, and if it is just a little bit, if it’s good, the readers will still give you a pass.
Or you can give it another pass, bring it into step with the future, and re-release it. That’s another kind of win. We’ll figure that out when the day comes.
So, writers, have you already written your first post-covid novel? Are you working on one now? Are you struggling with the decision to write one? Please tell us about it in the comments. Did I miss any major (or minor) approaches to writing into the unknown, unseeable science fiction world of next year? I’d love to hear about them.
To the comments with you!