In Asimov’s collection “Buy Jupiter and Other Stories” he gives a piece of advice to all new writers:

“However, something does occasionally occur to me, and one little tiny rule comes up in connection with RAIN, RAIN, GO AWAY. If you’re going to write a story, avoid contemporary references. They date a story and they have no staying power. The story mentions Schoendienst as having been at bat during a baseball game. Well, who the heck was Schoendienst? Do you remember? Does the name have meaning to you a decade and a half later?”

When I read the story, I didn’t even notice the reference to the Hall of Famer. However, the story is incredibly dated in other ways. The main plot of it involves a woman freaking out because some people moved in next door and she doesn’t even know what the husband does for a living. That sort of involvement in the lives of the neighborhood doesn’t exist anymore (especially in the land of the Seattle Freeze), but writing a story where that was intolerable made complete sense in the era. Other stories feature Multivac, a super intelligent computer that takes up entire city blocks; that seemed like the direction that computers were moving in the 1960s but we obviously moved in the direction of smaller and smaller devices.

It’s not just The Good Doctor who got caught up in surprising cultural changes. Take the Turtles’ song “Happy Together.” It featured the amazing line, “If I should call you up/Invest a dime.” If you had told the band that pay phones might end up costing a quarter, they’d lament the line no longer working. Explain that pay phones would become non-existent because everyone would carry their own personal phones at all time, causing the couplet needing an explanation to listeners, and that would catch them by surprise.

Is there a way of making a piece of work timeless? The first guess might be to make it a historical reenactment, but even that isn’t invulnerable. You can’t look at the past without using the glasses of the present. If nothing else, aspects that would be considered bizarre or surreal to the current culture would end up getting emphasized (or completely ignored if a change in values had occurred since then), which also would point a time stamp on the events, in the same way that art forgeries are sometimes discovered decades later as little tricks that were so commonplace as to be invisible to contemporary viewers become a product of their time and stand out as an obvious misstep.

The best thing I can think to do is to embrace the references. Sure, don’t go all Homer Simpson and write a novelty song about the trend to have Baby on Board signs on cars, but there are stages of irrelevance. If your song is good enough (and if it isn’t, you probably shouldn’t concern yourself too much about what people will think about it 10-20 years later), it might make it to the point where it becomes interesting for that reason. Every time Phish cover “Hello Ma Baby,” I’m amused by the cultural significance of telegraphs seen in, “Send me a kiss by wire.” Maybe we’ll reach peak oil (or the self driving cars will become a thing) and the driving culture seen in so many songs will make no sense to listeners. Maybe a disaster will strike the city you’re writing about and a carefree ditty about it will seem surreal. There’s no way of knowing which trends are permanent and which will seem odd in a decade or two.

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David Steinberg got his Masters Degree in mathematics from New Mexico State University in 1994. He first discovered the power of live music at the Capital Centre in 1988 and never has been the same. His Phish stats website is at http://www.ihoz.com/PhishStats.html and he’s on the board of directors for The Mockingbird Foundation. He now tweets and has a daily update on the Phish Stats Facebook page

His book This Has All Been Wonderful is available on Amazon, the Kindle Store, and his Create Space store.