Major oopsies due to publishing/authorial choices?

Cafe Society
1

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?

2

Yes. Norman Spinrad’s Russian Spring posits that the Soviet Union was the major superpower in the world in the near future. It came out in 1991, when the Soviet Union was obviously falling apart.

Isaac Asimov once wrote a story where the payoff was that we could never climb Mt. Everest because there was an alien outpost there that didn’t want to be discovered. The story came out six months after Hillary and Tenzing reached the summit. Of course, it was written before that.

3

Science Digest ran a cover story on “Why Stalin May Live to be 100”. It hit the newsstands the day he died.

Not an urban legend. I had a copy of that issue.

4

Here’s the opposite: Afred Jarry’s Ubu Roi is “'Set in Poland, which is to say nowhere” (original stage directions). At the time it was written, he was literally right: Poland didn’t exist as a state. It was re-established after WWI.

5

Lots of mysteries were published in 1942 that didn’t have the U.S. in the war, even though they were supposedly right up to date. I think a few made it all the way until 1943. Few had the actual numerical date in them, but reading them today makes trying to figure out exactly when they were written a better puzzle than the murders.

A teaser for the 2002 Spider-Man movie included shots of the twin towers in 2001. They were for the trailer only, though.