I’ve started reading “Troubled Blood”, one of the Cormorant Strike detective thrillers. It’s copyright 2020, was I believe released in 2020, and is explicitly set in 2020. I forget when the earliest scene may have happened, but a chapter I read yesterday explicitly says something like “September wound on” while our intrepid leads run around doing detective stuff mainly in London and Cornwall.
But.
There’s no mention at all of Covid. Nobody is masked, there are no problems with shutdowns, no overwhelmed hospitals, no thousands of deaths being reported…nada. Nobody has had so much as a cough.
Now, I didn’t spend any time in England during 2020, but…
So all I can think is the author and/or publisher wants this series to be seen as ‘up to the moment’ and thus the book was finished in, say, early 2019, but instead they used internal dates for 2020. Then it went through the months long publishing process and got actually released into a 2020 that was wildly different than anyone had predicted.
Anyone know of something similar happening before? Like a book (not fantasy or alternate history or such) published set in a specific time/place that simply didn’t exist any longer? Like, oh, something set in 1945 Europe where WWII hasn’t started? Or a something that happened to take place in the NYC Twin Towers post their actual destruction?