Tired of Today’s Tech: Writing Historical Fiction in a Technocratic American Present

The last time I wrote a novel set in what I considered to be the present was 2009-2010. The iPhone had appeared in 2007, but it had nothing to do with my characters, who were poor or old or both and lived on the scrappy outskirts of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Since then, my books have taken place in Florida, but not the Florida of today.

First, I dialed the year all the way back to 1865, indulging in a full year of research—histories and cookbooks and botanical guides and documentaries on DVD scattered all over my office and living room. Did I delve into a bygone century because I was hitting the age (my early forties) when men famously become interested in history? Perhaps.

How about because I love writing about Florida but also craved a fresh setting, a setting I hadn’t exhausted my ability to describe? Sure, that was probably part of it. How about coming across a line in a Padgett Powell book where he asks the reader if their professed interest in the Civil War far outstripped the knowledge they possessed about the Civil War, and my taking that line as a personal insult? A little bit, yeah.

But what I didn’t realize until recently was that I wasn’t just running toward a time period of interest; I was running away from something I feared: writing fiction that takes place in a world of relentless, insidious, omnipresent tech. I remember adopting a specific research goal regarding Ivory Shoals (the Civil War-era book), which was to grow familiar enough with common, everyday life—procedures for cooking and farm chores and going to the bathroom—that while writing a scene I could focus on my characters instead of worrying about the authenticity of the atmosphere.

What I didn’t realize then was that becoming comfortable enough with customs and norms to write a story set a hundred and sixty years ago was much less scary for me—an individual who has never owned a smartphone or used social media, a person who checks out books on CD from the brick-and-mortar library and doesn’t text—that moving back a century and a half was less intimidating than facing a now in which everyone is continually peering at a screen.

Writing a book set in the present without acknowledging the ever-present dominance of internet devices—this would feel dishonest to me. It would be to artificially warp the world for my own convenience. Like writing a Western without guns and horses because I don’t know enough about them. (And we can agree there’s a lot less to learn about guns and horses than about the merging of human consciousness with robot consciousness?)

As far as I was aware at the time, I chose 1990s Florida for my book Penalties of June because I wanted to depict both my home region of Pasco and Hernando counties and my version of the 90s. (The decade in which you come of age is like a family member in that you don’t choose it and it’s yours forever, but people who went to high school/college in the 90s also like their decade.)

What I understand now, though, facing the blank page again, is that for a semi-Luddite writer who prints up hardcopies of event tickets and writes driving directions out on envelopes before heading off into an unknown part of town, the present United States is a foreign and intimidating place, one to be shied away from if for no better reason than to not look out of touch and behind the times (which I understand can happen in a couple days if you go down with the flu).

Of course, there’s the much-lamented loss of plot facility that accompanies digital-age ease of communication—no two people ever being out of touch except by choice. Of course, it’s more difficult for writers if their characters can find out any fact they want to know at any moment.

Whining about working conditions isn’t the point, though. Here’s the point (and yes, I understand that I’m a Gen-X grump): Unless I embrace the ravenous technocracy that runs the contemporary world, I won’t ever feel comfortable engaging contemporary life in my writing, not honestly, not in an informed way, and, to be blunt, I just don’t like contemporary life. I don’t like it.

Don’t get me wrong—I enjoy my students and my own children, and none of this mess was their idea, but while 1865 Florida and even 1998 Florida were fascinating, unpredictable jungles (both literally and of humanity) I couldn’t wait to dive into, 2024 Florida (or Maryland or Washington or Wisconsin or Connecticut or wherever) seems a risk-averse, paved, litigious, double-encrypted, dull-eyed monoculture whose people are divided mostly by whatever political bent their algorithms have caught wind of and magnified back at them.

The lives of Americans (and I guess most everybody else) seem, from my forty-eight-year-old perspective, underpinned by constant, monotonous, low-grade stimulation and a dearth of romance. Not romance like candles and passionate embraces on foggy street corners and throwing wine glasses into a fireplace. I mean romantic like how paper and ink look and feel better than text on a screen.

Like how paper and ink are good for the soul. Like a real map that unfolds to a surprising, unwieldy size, and spills over the edges of the bar you’ve flattened it onto in the quiet 2 p.m. hotel lounge you wandered into lost, a paper map that the bartender can tap on with her blue-polished nail as she gives you directions and also adds that her ex lives in Gully Creek, so if you see him as you pass through tell him fuck himself.

Another thing to consider in service of this introspection is that I have, in fact, written a couple short stories that happen more or less now, and this exercise has in no way ameliorated my problem because, as you might guess, the entire raison d’etre of those stories was to criticize, lampoon, and satirize our digital existences. Any story I set in this strange, real world must be about that—about the problem of living there (here).

To think of “today” as a neutral setting, a setting for which I could choose the themes and concerns to emphasize, would feel, to me, something like writing a book that takes place in a small village at the foot of a colossal, actively erupting volcano, with lava already leveling half the houses and gouts of red-hot rock falling from the sky, but to insist that the volcano isn’t really important to the book.

And here we have the paradox: the people best equipped to regard the volcano as no big deal, as business as usual; would be people from the village, but I’m the theoretical writer and I’m not from that village. Not even close.

I already know where this ends. I’m going to have to stop complaining and run headlong into the volcanic shower. (We’ve only had one Civil War and I only went from child to young adult in one decade.) Writers did it when the car appeared, and the regular (dumb) telephone. (Though I’ll contend those advancements didn’t alter the culture a fraction as much as the internet and smartphones.)

Apple and Google and Intel aren’t going to cease and desist; hiding behind faux-optimistic hopes that we might return to a less prescribed and more visceral fashion of living is a form of denial, and one that sounds too much like standard-issue generational elitism.

My next long project will be a book set in a hotel in Arizona. I have sketches of two characters and nothing more. I can honestly say that in the writing of this yet-begun novel, I hope to embrace the now rather than cleverly (cowardly) avoiding it.

But it’s already crossed my mind that if the novel has a surrealist bent, those reality-twisting powers might be used to ward off iPhones. It’s occurred to me that an older, more curmudgeonly character might insist that a younger character stow away their device wherever the two speak. It’s occurred to me that in Arizona there’s still wild territory where cell phone signals don’t reach. (I think/hope this is still true.)

Only time will tell if I’m strong enough to resist all these myriad escape hatches. I’m a work-in-progress about to wrestle with a work-in-progress. Wish me luck. But not through text.

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Penalties of June by John Brandon is available via McSweeney’s.