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wrm5
Since: Mar, 2014
2015-04-19 15:49:07
Lost And Found is the place for this sort of query. (But since you're here... Harsher in Hindsight?
Edited by wrm5
AgProv
(4 Score & 7 Years Ago)

Hi! looking for a trope to describe a situation where:
An author, writing today, puts himself in the position of people fifty years ago who are trying to accurately predict their future based on knowledge they can reasonably be said to have at the time. We know what happened as we're looking back on it. But the characters in the book are trying to make intelligent guesses as to events in their future.
The context is in the book I'm currently writing a works page for. In the novel, in early 1962, intelligence officers from Britain and the USA are speculating on whereabouts in the world the two power blocs will have a major clash that might lead to all out war. They identify three possibilities: post-imperial spheres of influence in Africa (who gets control of the strategic raw materials necessary for industrial domination, as African countries become independent). Persia: too near Russia for comfort, and both superpowers need oil. And Cuba. Which they discount as an ineffectual nuisance. Any rational American government would realise it's an irrelevance and at most a minor embarrassment and leave it alone.
Fifty years on we know the flashpoint was going to be Cuba, the country those intelligence planners dismissed as a minor irritation. Which makes the situation deeply ironic based on our hindsight.
The novel (About Britain's nuclear defences in the Cold war) also has an incident where Swedish planes chase British nuclear-armed jets out of Swedish airspace. This is explained by a throwaway line about the Swedes being irked that any nuclear incidents nearby to them would deluge their country in fall-out, despite their neutrality. Again, the author could be seen as alluding to later nuclear accidents such as Chernobyl - which did throw lots of fall-out into Scandinavia.
but - what trope do I use? This doesn't seem to fit as Funny Aneurism Moment or Humour In Hindsight as it seems to describe the total opposite - a writer in 2012 writing about events in 1962, with full awareness of how the history panned out, and using his knowledge to write about it with deep irony. The tropes deal with things not known at the time of writing which only become apparent later. so... what fits here?
Edited by AgProv