PSA: Historical Writing

[mrissa]

If you are writing an historical story -- alternate history, secret history, straight-up historical, whatever -- please, please, please refrain from having your characters describe a current technology in clunky antiquated terms and then proclaim that sort of crazy thing impossible.

Please. Really. Maybe it was clever the first two times, but it passed into the realm of terminally lame well before I got to kindergarten.

(This means you, Harry Turtledove!)

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Okay, but why would every single historical story feature someone who would come up with the general idea of a Palm Pilot in the first place?

Sure, if someone did happen to come up with "a screen of moving light pictures somehow imaged from real life but made into fictional constructs," a tenth century monk would pooh-pooh the idea. But having a character come up with that idea only to have another character pooh-pooh it is lame.