Kottke quotes from a William Gibson interview in which he says:
If one had gone to talk to a publisher in 1977 with a scenario for a science-fiction novel that was in effect the scenario for the year 2007, nobody would buy anything like it. It’s too complex, with too many huge sci-fi tropes: global warming; the lethal, sexually transmitted immune-system disease; the United States, attacked by crazy terrorists, invading the wrong country. Any one of these would have been more than adequate for a science-fiction novel. But if you suggested doing them all and presenting that as an imaginary future, they’d not only show you the door, they’d probably call security.
I have to wonder if that’s not always true. Any of the items that Gibson mentioned would be the subject of a full-blown novel — with each of the items taking up nearly full-time the attention of all world leaders and top scientists and the like.
But imagine a writer in 1947 going in with a proposal about a novel set in 1977. Would an editor consider it too improbably busy to include the launch of Voyagers 1 and 2, the first nodes of ARPAnet (later the Internet) going online, the first test of the stealth fighter, the opening of Star Wars, the first space shuttle test flights, the eradication of smallpox, and the Tenerife 747 disaster (amongst many other 1977 events)?
And those are strictly 1977. Gibson’s scenario encompasses items in the news for the last 5-7 years — encompass all the items from 1971-77, and you’d have a panoply of events each of which would make for a world-focus-encompassing novel.
Heck, anyone who came up with a list as complicated as that 1977 events list and tried to sandwich that into a novel would be greeted with a lot of red ink, I suspect.
By definition, any novel is going to be a narrow view of events. Nothing short of an immediate planetary disaster of diplomatic crisis is going to keep any more than a few folks focused on one thing for more than a few days. It’s always a shock to me to read one of those “year in review” sorts of items because some of the events described seem like that can’t have happened just in the last year — last January can feel like last decade.
Things are always busier than they seem. Just as a sculptor chips away everything except the subject being portrayed, a novelist perforce shaves away all but the critical events, simplifying the world to make events match the message seeking portrayal. It’s always an abstraction, I suspect, because life — macro and micro — is always more complicated than even the best novelist can make it (or would want to).