The Sword and Laser discussion

I am a good chunk of the way through the book(a little 6 hours left in the audio book), and am enjoying it. One of the unintentional things I especially like is what I am calling meta time travel. Sy is observing/marveling on the things that changed in NYC (such as the skyline) and things that remained the same(such as the Dakota).
But as the book was written in 1970, the thing that I, and I would imagine many people in 2015 would associate with the Dakota(the murder of John Lennon) hadn't happened yet. And as far as the skyline goes, the twin towers didn't go up until a couple years later.
So I find myself both agreeing with Sy's observations on the 1880s as well as marveling at the differences between his modern world and my own...

Todd wrote: " And as far as the skyline goes, the twin towers didn't go up until a couple years later. "

Construction started in August 1968. Simon Morley would have known about them.

There are some photos on the Wikipedia page that shows how they looked in late 69 and 1970. WTC

Yeah, if you're not familiar with NYC from the 70s, it's probably hard to imagine that the Twin Towers had been a fixture of the skyline since the late 60s. They've always seemed more modern.

My dad's from Brooklyn, so we made annual pilgrimages to the Apple and the rough construction of the towers was already complete by 1970. They didn't get the outside on them until 1972-73, but they dominated the area already.

Somewhere my mom has a great photo of me and my brother, age 6 and 4, with George Segal and Ron Liebman from when they were filming The Hot Rock in 1971, all of us standing in front of the WTC. One of the towers is pretty much complete.

Ok, I'll admit my wording was sloppy. I know that they were well underway by that time, but my point was that the author(who according to wikipedia had been living in CA for awhile before this) mentioned the differences between several iconic NYC landmarks between 1970 and 1882, and there was a complete lack of mentioning of WTC. Had the book been written 10 or 20 years later(by which time they would be associated with the NYC skyline by practically anyone)I suspect it would have been mentioned.
It was more the discussion about the Dakota that did it for me though...I was wondering why it rated that much of an explanation until I realized that in 1970, it probably didn't have quite the worldwide attention as it did a decade or so later.

Right from the get go, with the description of the graphic design work, I was struck by the difference between Si's modern world and our own. You've got to love the photoshopping without the photoshop program.

D. H. wrote: "Right from the get go, with the description of the graphic design work, I was struck by the difference between Si's modern world and our own. You've got to love the photoshopping without the photos..."
Yeah, I had forgotten about that! I thought the same thing...so did they make a verb for it back then, I wonder? :)

D. H. wrote: "Right from the get go, with the description of the graphic design work, I was struck by the difference between Si's modern world and our own. You've got to love the photoshopping without the photos..."

This is the bit I found jarring:

The effect, when finished, would be to remove the suit, leaving the girl apparently naked... [T]he retouched picture would be added to a collection of others like it on the art-department bulletin board, at which Maureen our nineteen year old paste-up girl and messenger refused ever to look or even glance, though often urged.

Ha-ha-ha, pervasive sexual harassment.

Todd wrote: "Yeah, I had forgotten about that! I thought the same thing...so did they make a verb for it back then, I wonder? :)"

Airbrushing.

Sean wrote: "This is the bit I found jarring:

The effect, when finished, would be to remove the suit, leaving the girl apparently naked... [T]he retouched picture would be added to a collection of others like it on the art-department bulletin board, at which Maureen our nineteen year old paste-up girl and messenger refused ever to look or even glance, though often urged."

Yes! The elbow nudge, isn't it funny to sexually harass women comment was a throwback.

D. H. wrote: "Sean wrote: "This is the bit I found jarring:

The effect, when finished, would be to remove the suit, leaving the girl apparently naked... [T]he retouched picture would be added to a collection of..."

There's a handful of places early on where it shows up. I had the worst time imagining his present as 1970. I keep imagining 1950 instead. I blame Back to the Future. Also, probably because I wasn't born yet in 1970, and so I don't know what it looked like outside of a disco.

Joanna wrote: " Also, probably because I wasn't born yet in 1970, and so I don't know what it looked like outside of a disco."

Disco was late '70s -- actually the Disco era lasted into the early '80s. 1970 was still what we think of as the 1960s -- anti-war protests, civil rights protests, women's lib, the sexual revolution, etc.

Which makes me kinda uncomfortable with the novel's romanticization of the 1880s -- an era when the South had finally overthrown Reconstruction and started on the path to Jim Crow; when women were fighting for the right to simply own property; and when labor laws were non-existent and company owners could call in the police to beat the crap out of anyone who tried to organize a union. The narrator turns a blind eye to all that and glorifies the period while scorning the era when those things were being overturned right and left.

Sean wrote: "Joanna wrote: " Also, probably because I wasn't born yet in 1970, and so I don't know what it looked like outside of a disco."

Disco was late '70s -- actually the Disco era lasted into the early '..."

There's a trope for that: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php...

The great Louis CK has a bit on that, but a warning "dirty words" are in use, in perfect spots I should add.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87LGm...

I was in high school in 1970 and I also felt like his present seemed more like 1950.

Serendi wrote: "I was in high school in 1970 and I also felt like his present seemed more like 1950."

That's because his 1970 WAS 1950.

I'll need to explain that.

When Finney wrote this book, he was already 58 or 59 years old. By that age you're pretty much settled in your ways and the things that defined you are decades in the past. Many (probably most) of us get sort of mentally stuck in our late-20s to mid-30s and we relate to the world from that perspective.

Other than the big things that dominate the news, you pretty much stop paying attention to trends. As an example from my own life (I'm 50), for the past few years as I wait at the grocery checkout lane I look at the magazine covers and even though I stay fairly current with pop culture I literally have no idea who 90% of the people are on those covers.

I'll bet if you're in your mid-30s and older, you probably think this new man-bun ("muns") look is ridiculous. (Not you specifically Serendi, the generic "you".) The same way your hairstyle looked ridiculous to your parents. That's because your mental image of what's cool is from an earlier generation, whether that was 5 years or 5 decades earlier.

So Finney isn't looking at 1970 as it actually *is*, he's comparing it to 1947 or something, the snapshot of time that is his guiding mental image. He probably doesn't own a color TV (my parents didn't get one until 1972), he has no idea who all these so-called "movie stars" are, and all he hears about on the news is violence and uprisings and protests and he wonders why it can't be like the good old days.

Joanna wrote: "Sean wrote: "Joanna wrote: " Also, probably because I wasn't born yet in 1970, and so I don't know what it looked like outside of a disco."

Disco was late '70s -- actually the Disco era lasted int..."

For some reason TV Tropes isn't opening for me.

In case it's not referenced on that page (although it probably is), here's the Louis CK bit on time travel being exclusively a white privilege.

It's Louis CK so it's probably NSFW or appropriate for kids. You should get your HR director to watch it with you or call a 9-year-old over to make sure that's so.

Trike wrote: "Serendi wrote: "I was in high school in 1970 and I also felt like his present seemed more like 1950."

That's because his 1970 WAS 1950.

I'll need to explain that...."

Whoa. Also, that implies that my mental reality is stuck somewhere in the aughties.

The 70's-ness finally came clear in the last chapter or so. The main character talks about Vietnam and other events that happened right around then.

Maybe someone has got an idea where Jack Finney got all those photos (Felix's) and sketches of 19th century New York? There are at least very detailed portraits of Simon Morley and Julia and Ada and Felix from the hotel in Gramercy park. Not sure if they are real photos or penciled works but it's very rare to see that fictional characters have actual faces in a book.

Daniel wrote: "Maybe someone has got an idea where Jack Finney got all those photos (Felix's) and sketches of 19th century New York? There are at least very detailed portraits of Simon Morley and Julia and Ada an..."

In the afterward of the edition I read, he gives credit to a whole bunch of old libraries, museums, and private collectors. I think he assembled the pictures and then tailored his descriptions around them.

I think I would enjoy an "annotated version" which mentioned his source for each picture and his research and went into detail when he changed stuff for the sake of the story, and so on.

I just figured he went back in time and took them himself. :)

Joanna's got it. Pretty detailed annotation on the pix, although for when and how they were taken you'd probably have to go to the museum and ask, assuming they even knew.

There was an observation about "his hair looked like three weeks past needing to be cut and hadn't been combed in four."

LOL what a fussy (50s/60s) observation. :)