More years ago than I care to count, I wrote a novel. It fell somewhere in the thriller category and followed on two previous books about the same group of people. (It was well before 9/11: the ultimate chapter took place at the base of one of the World Trade Center buildings, and previously the characters had dined at Windows on the World.)

I really liked this book. It was fun to write. But it took me rather a long time to write it—this was quite a while before I became a fulltime writer. And something happened between my starting the novel and finishing it.

That something was the Internet.

The premise upon which my entire novel was based was that a special encoded card in the possession of my protagonist contained damning information that several entities were after. Chases, skullduggery, and drama ensued. The novel worked because there was one physical card containing the desired information.

*image: Getty Images in collaboration with Unsplash*

I was thinking about that recently when I was talking with a writing student about her work in progress. I was cautioning her about randomly inserting world events into her narrative, thus “placing” it on a timeline that would not remain contemporary. But even as we were having that conversation, I was also realizing that while we might avoid political references, what we can’t avoid is the relentless and ever-accelerating march of technology.

In 2024, I can easily write a story that includes streaming a film into a character’s Roku-enabled television set, enabling her to purchase something online in three minutes (and have it delivered the next day), and looking around for a charging station in which to plug her EV.

Will that story be read in the same way in 2025? What about in 2030? Five years ago we had no idea the immediate effects artificial intelligence would have on our daily lives—and that pace is only going to accelerate. We didn’t imagine self-driving cars would wake a San Francisco neighborhood while jockeying for position in a parking lot at night (yeah, that happened). We wouldn’t have considered an online telehealth meeting to be real medicine.

One of the factors I notice when I think about this is how, as our technology expands, our opportunities for certain plotlines vanish. Anyone who’s flown abroad can tell you how close to impossible it is today to use counterfeit documents, or bring anything untoward onto an airplane. Unless we have sophisticated applications on our devices, we can’t make untraceable phone calls. In most urban areas, CCTV cameras observe and record our movements. False information can be countered with a quick Google search (though to be fair, in this election year there’s pretty good evidence to show that not everyone avails themselves of that option).

I think readers are okay with most technology references becoming dated, understanding intuitively that even though characters pull maps from gloveboxes to find their way somewhere, stop and locate a pay phone when they have to make a call, consider that “tablets” refers to paper, their story isn’t necessarily historical fiction. And it’s important to trust your readers, to know they know how fast this is all moving…

But it also leaves writers in an odd position. We can try and imagine what technology will bring us in the near future (and there are many brilliant science-fiction writers who do that well), but no matter how informed our guesses are, that’s all they are. Try and write without referencing current technologies? Good luck with that.

And maybe it’s not such a bad thing, to record our lived environments through storytelling, one of humankind’s oldest tools. I was reminded recently of the light-blue streamlined princess telephone I had in one of my first apartments, and the memory made me smile. Would I drop it into a story? Probably not, unless it was part of a particular plot-point… but wouldn’t it be fun?

Every story is a product of its time as well as of the author’s imagination. The stories that endure are the ones that can be prised out of their context and appropriated by other populations, other generations. And if they do that well enough, then a little bit of outdated technology won’t hurt.

Is Technology a Writer’s Friend?

When Great Artists do Terrible Things

Worried About Code-Switching? Try and Go a Day Without It!