I recently finished reading a very good book, The Moon and the Other. This isn’t a review; instead, I wanted to point out something it did that I found both interesting and actually a little distracting due to its rarity in science fiction. Fair warning: very, very mild spoilers ahead.
One of the main viewpoint characters in the novel is a man who was banished from the “Society of Cousins,” a matriarchal society that made me think (at first) that the book was going to be some sort of weird inverse of The Handmaid’s Tale. The person–another man–who convinced him to do the deed that got them both banished? He goes by the pseudonym “Tyler Durden.” (For those of you that don’t immediately recognize that name, it’s a character from Fight Club, played memorably in the movie by Brad Pitt.)
Later, there’s a very minor plot involving a theoretical virus that would have done damage to that self-same society, proposed by Mr. Durden. The name of the virus? GROSS. (If you don’t recognize that, get yourself to a copy of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, stat.)
Both of these references startled me when I came across them. That’s because, for most science fiction, the authors work pretty hard at pretending that culture past, say, Mozart or Bach doesn’t really exist. It’s very rare to see modern things referenced directly in a work. Obviously I’m excluding borderline-fanfic stuff like Ernest Cline’s novels, which exist as an explicit love letter to ’80s pop culture; I’m talking about otherwise “normal” science fiction. At most, they’ll occasionally do one of those sets-of-threes things where the first reference is classical, the second modern, and the third fictional, something like:
Genndy sat down at the ancient piano and plinked a few tentative notes, then launched into a whirlwind tour of the canon: Mozart, Joel, Oda-Wheeler.
That’s a made-up example, but you see such things littered across much of science fiction. Usually the references end there, though.
When a work refers to a real-life thing, it’s often changed in some way; I’m currently in the middle of reading The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., where it’s not the Pentagon but the Trapezoid. Sometimes that sort of thing works, but given the fact that D.O.D.O. is all about history–and a couple of sentences later it specifically refers to George Washington–this sort of off-brand filtering can be, in its own way, even more distracting than just using the real name. (On the other hand, given the core conceit of the novel, it’s possible that the building is the Trapezoid for Reasons. It’s a Neal Stephenson novel, so I might not find that out for another six thousand pages or so.)
Going back to The Moon and the Other, I can kind of get why this sort of thing is rare. For one, you risk dating the novel; references to Lorena Bobbitt (as a random example I’d never actually use in a story) already risk falling off the comprehensibility cliff, so if you don’t pick your target well you risk making it completely opaque to the reader. And given my reaction to seeing contemporary references in a modern novel, the smart money may be keeping it all the way back to Mozart. But I actually think that “Tyler Durden” is the sort of reference that will stay relevant for a surprisingly long time, and while I sadly suspect “GROSS” will age poorly, as kids don’t grow up reading Calvin and Hobbes, it also wasn’t crucial to the plot.
Still, it makes me think how such things apply to my own writing. In Rewind I explicitly explore a couple of close-to-our-own realities that turn out slightly different, so these types references are actually fairly important to the story, but I also carefully never placed the novel in a specific city or precise time to avoid some of those selfsame issues. Having read The Moon and the Other, I’m going to be giving even more serious consideration to the real-world references in my own works. A mild shock is good; pulling a reader out of the fictional world is not.