Welcome to the Elsewhere. Or should it be Elsewhen? More than one cheap sci.fi story treats time as simply another dimension, perhaps traversed forward-only, perhaps not. But, rather than using time and place as a plot device, let's turn the model around, and look at the stories we read, write, enjoy and loathe, using time as a measuring rod, using place as a lens.

A good story should be timeless. It should appeal to as large a target audience as possible. 'Large' in this context means not just geographical (or cultural) area, but also time. A good story is timeless.

The Bible is full of stories. Some are timeless. Others are forgotten. (Or remembered only by a few of the hardcore. Ask yourself as an author -- which would you rather be, ignobly forgotten, or lauded by extremists? Me, I'd rather be neither.)

Even Joseph Campbell's work, "Hero of a Thousand Faces" is limited in geographic scope, though he does an excellent job of tracing common story themes and thread throughout time. The problem is simple: his ideas are applicable only to Western cultures, having been drawn from Greco-Roman mythology. They don't work (very well) for Eastern cultures.

Oddly enough, the best pop.culture quote for this comes from an Asian archetype in what is possibly the most recognizable execution of the Campbellian monomyth story arc: Star Wars. Specifically, Yoda's quote, "Wars do not make one great."

Yoda epitomizes one of the Eastern hero archetypes - small, overlooked, patient and wise. While the west idolizes fighters, the east looks up to warrior-scholars, warrior-monks, warrior-philosophers.

This is reflected in strategic boardgames as well. The most common western strategic boardgame is chess (which, by some claims, started in India). The object of chess centers on a unique, irreplacable piece, the King. China has its own version of chess, with similar goals, but it and Japan play Go, where each piece as as nameless and interchangable as any other. See how these correlate to their respective cultures' ideal of heroism?

Incidentally, more than one military historian has opined that America's near-defeat in the early days of the Korean War were related to this mindset: the Chinese (and, through their proxies, the North Koreans) did not hesitate to throw life after life to achieve their objective, in contrast to American military doctrine of relative worth.

How does this relate to stories? Only as an unsolvable problem. As authors, we must seek to maximize our target audience in terms of culture. We can mitgate this by avoiding pop.culture references to key areas, lest that alienate readers unfamiliar with our culture. We can try to avoid temporal references as well.

For example, I recently finished Nelson DeMille's Night Fall. I read it mostly for the John Corey wiseguy character, but, at the end, I couldn't help but wonder how it would read in ten or twenty years because it hinged on a specific event in time.

All our stories are 'locked in time,' even futurist ones. If you look at 'visions of the future' from the 50's, the 60's and the 70's (the 80's dystopia being too depressing) you'll see different visions of utopia. An illustration or a plot device from some sci.fi story from any of those eras will likely seem dated. ("Likely" being the qualifier because each era has those who were ahead of their time, as well as those who wrote 'retro'.)

Colloqualisms, trends, jargon. Even "Dial 999!" as opposed to "Dial 911!" risk jarring the reader out of the 'fictive illusion' we seek to craft and maintain while we work our semantic magic. What other ways have you seen where an author 'locks' a story to a given time or place, and were they to the story's credit or detriment?