Christian Speculative Fiction discussion

I've started writing my next novel (yay!), and in the process, an interesting question came up that I'd like to hear your opinion on.

This novel is set in the mid-future of our own Earth, at a time when the Moon has been colonized and regular commercial/passenger spaceflight between Earth and Moon is as commonplace as intercontinental air travel is today. I specified the year as 2081, because I figure if all the pieces line up correctly, that is a feasible outlook for sixty years from now. (Remember, it only took about sixty years to go from the Wright Brothers to Moon missions.)

However, as I was specifying the year in the prose, I remembered some feedback a beta reader had given me many years ago, how you shouldn't mention specific years in sci-fi because your book will be dated when the actual year arrives and it's nothing like how you imagined.

Thing is, I've never had a problem with this in sci-fi. Maybe it's fun to chuckle a little about how we ended up HAL-less in 2001, but "expired" future dates in old science fiction books have never soured the book for me. The reasons for this are twofold:

1) Some hard sci-fi authors just really enjoy extrapolating possible engineering futures based on current technological trends. For them, it's fun to pick a certain time span and imagine what sort of engineering and scientific advancements might be made in that span. They're definitely not saying "this is definitely what this year will look like", but "if things keep up at this pace and everything lines up correctly, I think there's a very good chance this year could look like this".

Back in the 1960's, when the Space Race was in full swing, just about every space mission achieved an amazing milestone, and NASA had an enormous budget, it was very easy to imagine Moon bases merely 20 years from then. In fact, many people were expecting it as a matter of course. I can't begrudge authors back then for wanting to play around with a specific point in the future and really believing we'd see human exploration of Mars in the 1980's. They didn't know the budget would peter out during the Apollo program. They didn't know public support would sway because of social and political issues. They didn't know about the Challenger accident.

Every sensible author knows that when you set a story in the future, it's not because you're absolutely certain that future is going to happen. It's because you have a vision for the story that involves a projection - or disruption - of current trends. In that way, future sci-fi also becomes a relevant commentary on the author's present.

2) It quickly and easily sets the scene for a story. As a reader, I actually find that if dates aren't mentioned and suddenly the writer starts talking about things like Mars colonies and artificial gravity, I feel disoriented. Is the writer describing an alternate version of our present, or the future? And if the latter, about how far in the future? I dislike being left too much in the dark when it comes to worldbuilding context, except for things like high fantasy where it's obvious from the start that the plot takes place in a completely different world.

The alternative to that might be to give a lot of background information on how the story's future got to that point, but you still have the problem of needing to establish a baseline from which that future sprang, which may still require mentioning a starting year. It's also an issue if, for plot purposes, you are not terribly interested in how the future got to be. My main character spends just about a chapter in her future Earth before she gets thrown into the Andromeda Galaxy. With 90% of the plot taking place there, it wouldn't make sense to me to go into extreme detail about the history behind this version of Earth's 2081 when none of it will be relevant to the storyline. I just needed to quickly, firmly establish that hey, this takes place in the mid-future and that's why the MC is headed to a job at a Moon colony.

So what are your thoughts? Is the no-mentioning-dates thing a hard-and-fast rule, or just a matter of opinion and personal taste? How do you feel when authors mention specific future dates? What do you do in your own writing?

I just think it's a matter of opinion. If it works for your story and you're happy with it, then I wouldn't leave it out for fear of making a false prediction. It's storytelling - in your world, technology proceeded at (this rate), and by (this year), we had (moon colonies) or whatever. It helps establish the then and now to the reader.

In my story, I personally didn't do this because I ended up involving a lot of fantasy elements and what if scenarios. The thing that keys off the events in my story is a major war on Earth, and I didn't want to give a year for that. I just said it happened, and from there the events unfold and the fantasy stuff starts to get involved. This is because I wanted my story to be more of a parable that could work across time, regardless of who reads it and when, than a speculation on what could be.

For the setting you described, I think it's fine to include a year, personally. See if it gets in the way as you go at any point, and if it does, you can just drop it.

That makes sense. Thanks for your input!