Weird

[moon_custafer]

I saw a post yesterday, either here or on Tumblr, recommending the Dortmunder books (which I’d vaguely heard of* but have never read), and now I can’t find it again.

*I’m pretty sure Stephen Fry wrote something about headcanoning the series-typical “books were written over several decades and the technology keeps up to date but the characters never age” as the result of Dortmunder and Co. having stolen a time machine.

Comments

[sovay]

“books were written over several decades and the technology keeps up to date but the characters never age”

Diane Duane's Young Wizards series had a case of this as well.

[pedanther]

There's a bunch of them. Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novels start with Wolfe buying his first legal beer at the end of Prohibition and end with him dealing with some fallout from the Watergate scandal, and he doesn't age a day in between. Stout didn't mind hanging a lantern on it occasionally, either: there's one of the later novels where Wolfe and Archie meet a character from one of the earliest novels and he's like "it must be 37 years since I last saw you two" and everybody agrees this is the case and nobody points out that Archie is (as always) less than 37 years old.

The Young Wizards series is an interesting one, because a few years ago the earliest books in the series were given revised editions to bring the tech and cultural references up to date with the more recent ones. But the side-series about the feline wizards hasn't been updated (and probably never will be, because part of the first novel revolves around an extremely specific cultural phenomenon), so it's in the interesting position of being set partway through the Young Wizards series and also several decades before the Young Wizards series.