h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I planned a story set in a school in the 1960s, on the general principle that I could write about that time, because I was there.

But I wonder if it's really easy to write about the recent past. You could write about, say, the Roman empire, and play about with the facts, up to a point, and get away with it. No Roman is going to turn up and say 'You got this wrong', or whatever the equivalent was in Latin. However, if you wrote a story set in 1963 and mention a car that wasn't produced until the 1970s, or a Beatles record that wasn't released until 1965, and somebody will notice.

I suspect the answer is - do your research anyway, and then decide what liberties you want to take.

Great point.

I notice that people nitpick at stuff like that all the time.

Of course, when the film 'Troy' came out, I was working with people who complained endlessly about it. Being stuck in a translation department with classics scholars who were mad at Wolfgang Peterson... It was pretty funny. They hated that 'Alexander' thing, too. Me, I don't even mind 'Hercules' and his surfer-dude friends, though I do know better.

I'm as guilty as the next history nerd of kwetching about Civil War dramas, or whatever...on the other hand, ignorance can make people critical in the oddest ways. Take the film 'The Conspirator'.

'The Conspirator' is a pretty accurate film about the trial of Mary Surratt, a boarding-house landlady in Washington, DC, whose son was involved with John Wilkes Booth. She was hanged for her role in the Lincoln assassination. Most people feel she got a raw deal.

What upset viewers who didn't know the history was that the conspirators were led into court with burlap sacks over their heads.

Outrage. 'Those filmmakers are trying to draw cheap parallels to Gitmo.'

Nope. That really happened. I've seen the photographs, they're in the archives. The 'parallels to Gitmo' were already there, sorry, can't be helped. People don't get any saner, I'm afraid.

I'm willing to bet: if you write about the 60s, and tell it *exactly as you remember it*, somebody will carp and claim it didn't happen the way you said it did. You might add endnotes, as some people do.

Philip Dick wrote a book called 'Time Out of Joint'. The main character couldn't face his responsibilities - he was the only one who could prevent the destruction of Earth - so he invented a sort of simulated reality to live and work in. (Since Dick wrote this before virtual reality, it was scifi.) The false reality was in 1959, a year the main character knew well. Somebody in the story had an old Tucker car.

This confused readers. The movie about Tucker hadn't been made yet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Tucker_Sedan

The moral of this story is that, while readers might be able choose the writers they read, writers can't choose the readers who read their writing!

Oh, I like that one!