Famous, Famous, Fictional: Difference between revisions

m
clean up
m (update links)
m (clean up)
Line 8:
Usually the trope serves only to remind us that it is, in fact, the future and people haven't stopped thinking and discovering things in between our time and story's setting. It would be odd if there hasn't been any new discoveries or geniuses worth mentioning, especially if the story involves something like [[Faster-Than-Light Travel]]. When someone or something we already know is used as such, then author is just making a point: say, if [[Stephen Hawking|Hawking]] is mentioned, that means people of the future in that verse think he is a genius equal to Newton and Einstein, meaning that readers also should.
 
'''Extremely''' prone to [[Rule of Three]] -- meaning—meaning we go far enough to the future to see a new example but not far enough to not remember those we know currently. It is much harder to find an example which doesn't follow a "present, present, future" (or for added symbolism, "past, present, future") scheme. When there is a long list of examples, expect a third of them to be from the future. Particularly when the work is from the 1950s or 1960s, the third future example will often have a East Asian (or less commonly African or Indian) name, indicative of the the idea that these parts of the world would have a bigger part to play in the future in what at the time were still considered mostly European- and American-dominated fields like the sciences.
 
A variation occurs when it's alternate reality: say, when someone mentions [[Alexander the Great|Alexander]], [[Napoleon Bonaparte|Bonaparte]] and [[Josef Stalin|Stalin]] as world dominators who failed, it means that in this reality the changing event is somewhere between mid XVII and early XX, which made Stalin and not [[Adolf Hitler|Hitler]] start [[WWII]].
10,856

edits