“Under the Dome” by Stephen King is a comforting, nostalgic listen to me. I’d walk for up to 30 mins or more, from work to home and back, just listening to it, in years past.
Listened to it again rather recently and one bit, that hasn’t aged well at all is the bit with the military “boosting the wifi” so the tech nerd kid (who is written like someone much, much older, with slang like that of an old surfer dude) could broadcast a video in “full 1080p hd!”.
Now granted, the scene is still effective and gets done what it needs to (in that oddly cozy King style) but good grief, I cringe each time. It’s like listening to a “zoom and enhance!” bit from a bad early 00s procedural.
What are some other examples of this? Again, not instances of bad writing, exactly, but where the author seemed more than a little out of their depth?
I read a short book that I guess was in the crime genre. The whole thing was set in the 90s, though the author didn’t really make that clear for a while.
I started to notice all these anachronisms, like the main character grabbing her laptop. She gets locked out of her bank account, that she’s logging into on her smartphone.
There was one part where she installs surveillance cameras of the sort you could get today, like a Ring camera.
I think the author was barely alive in the 90s and had no idea we didn’t have stuff like that! And her editor must not have known either because it all made it into the book. Ridiculous!