Writing around the future

I have been in this position before.

When writing Mercer Street in 2015, I had to contend with the Chicago Cubs. The Cubs, you may recall, were a bad baseball team for a long time. Between 1946 and 2014, they did not reach the World Series even once. So assuming — in the novel — that they would NOT reach the World Series in 2015 seemed like a safe bet.

Then the 2015 Cubs started winning and messed things up. They tore through the National League playoffs and put the World Series matter in doubt until October 21. The New York Mets, who swept the Cubs in the league championship series, saved me from rewriting a book I had held in reserve for four weeks.

In The Mirror, written in 2013 but set partly in 2021, I had to guess what the world would look like eight years hence. In Indiana Belle and Class of '59, published in 2016, I had to write around a presidential election because I did not know the outcome.

Enter the coronavirus. What once looked like a short-term problem for everyone has turned into a long-term problem for someone setting a series, at least partly, in the years 2021 to 2023. Like other writers setting books in the near future, I am forced to ask what the world will look like next year — or the next.

In The Fair, my current work in progress, I make only two passing mentions to social distancing and none to COVID-19. I assume that the pandemic currently sweeping the globe will be old news by the time the Lanes, my time travelers, leave the present in August 2021. I hope, for many reasons, that I'm right.

The safe approach, of course, is to set books far into the future. When you write about events decades or even centuries away, you limit the number of finger-waggers who can remind you that you got it wrong. You give yourself wiggle room.

Some writers, of course, stick their necks out anyway and come out smelling like a rose. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, written in 1948, seems eerily prescient today. So do the works of H.G. Wells and other authors. TIME magazine mentioned several in 2018.

Fortunately for the Lanes, they will spend more time in years like 1865 and 1893 than the 2020s. Writing about their battles with influenza and tuberculosis will require more research the guesswork. The Fair, the second book of the Time Box series, is now in the revision stage. I hope to publish it by August 1.