Infinite Summer

SPOILERISH FOR COMPARING SUBSIDIZED TIME TO B.S. TIME:

In winter 1960, JOI's father says "Son, you're ten..." p 159. So he was born around 1950, depending on month/day.

JOI died in the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar (p 64).

JOI died at age 54 (p 64).

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JOI died about 2004.

2004 is approximately Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar.

From chronology on p 223, YDAU is around 2009.

Without being too spoilerish, various clues in the text have led most who've tried to do the math to suspect IJ's setting is right around our present.

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Also, from the chronology on page 223:

I really don't see the novel as really having a sci-fi bent to it. Of course, I read the novel for the first time this year. Maybe if I read it in 1996, I would think differently.

IJ has high-definition TV, "on demand" entertainment, cartridges available basically by a "netflix"-like service, video phones, entertainment monopolies (seriously, once Charter or Comcast buys the other, we might as well call them Interlace), the computer as multi-media home theater w/high-speed internet, more people working from home, an unnecessarily vain president, an overbearing presidential cabinet member as the brain trust (Rod the God Cheney, last administration), US-Canada-Mexico alliance (cf. the "Amero" conspiracy theory), the NFL with its players literally as mascots, an ultra-connected informational world where people are growing further apart...

Even in 1996, did DFW call it.

The only "sci-fi" element in IJ is the energy source, "annular" fusion; however, I don't think it's as advanced as certain people in the book want you to believe. To me, it just seems like the former US is flinging nuclear waste into the Convexity (with respect to my French-Canadian ancestry), and it's debatable what the Convexity is really like,[*] thanks in no part to JOI being a film-maker, and therefore able to create all the propaganda he wants.

[*]