It Will Never Catch On/Literature

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of It Will Never Catch On in Literature include:

Discworld

  • In one scene in Witches Abroad, the witches discuss whether they could fly people about on a "really big broom" in a manner reminiscent of commercial airline travel, alluding to the names of several Roundworld airlines in the process. Naturally, they decide it'd never catch on.
  • Mad Scientist Leonard of Quirm has developed sticky notes, espresso (or "very fast coffee", as he calls it), and the bicycle, among other things, but is never quite sure if the devices he invents will catch on. Leonard of Quirm tends to do this most often with his weaponry designs. He will often devise a weapon capable of annihilating whole armies or destroying mountains, but is naive enough to believe that no one would build or use such a destructive weapon.
    • He seems to be learning, however; in Jingo he designs an underwater war machine then reconsiders and destroys the design... but only after Nobby Nobbs has spent nearly the entire book pointing out to him the ways it could be used in war.
    • Leonard also invents an encryption machine (at Vetinari's request) which he calls something long and convoluted.[1] The initials of its name work out to Enigma, a real-world encryption engine used by the Germans in World War II. Leonard's inventions are brilliant, but the names never catch on. In the same vein, he calls the previously mentioned underwater war machine affectionately the boat, in lieu of calling it the Going-Under-The-Water-Safely Device. He points out, that he came up with the convoluted name after considering that the boat is submersed in a marine environment.
  • Rincewind in The Last Continent: "What kind of idiot puts beer in tins?" Also the practice of hanging corks from a hatbrim to keep flies off. People he meets disbelieve that this could work, because surely someone would have thought of it by now.
  • Rincewind in Sourcery: "Telling stories in a harem? It's not bloody normal! It'll never catch on!"

Other works

  • In the sci-fi novel The Cross-Time Engineer, one character tells a bartender that women in bunny outfits (à la Playboy bunnies) will help business. Also something of a subversion, in that the bartender takes his advice, but eventually has trouble finding new employees when the girls keep running off to get married.
  • Done in Good Omens with Agnes Nutter, a precognitive witch. She is considered mad for her belief in such bizarre health ideas like washing up and jogging.
    • On the other hand, Agnes also does predict some things that really DID never catch on. (Doe Notte Buy Betamacks.)
  • Believe it or not, this goes all the way back to Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities; first when Darnay gets yelled at for suggesting that George Washington will become better known than George III, and again, played for irony, when Monsieur the Marquis remarks that the line of Kings Louis of France will continue for eternity—and he says this during the reign of Louis XVI, of course.
  • In another example, also Older Than Radio, Edgar Allan Poe used this in his 1845 story "The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade". It is written as an epilogue to the Arabian Nights, in which Scheherazade makes the mistake of putting modern (for Poe's time) inventions in one of her stories, causing the disbelieving sultan to have her executed.
  • Marc Acito's novel How I Paid for College, which takes place in the 1980's, has a few of these, but the one that stands out is one character claiming that "Madonna's a flash in the pan. She'll never last."
  • Marcus Didius Falco, a Private Detective in Ancient Rome, writes a play, The Spook Who Spoke, whose plot is remarkably similar to Hamlet. The actor he describes it to instantly rejects the idea, as ghosts don't speak in plays. On another occasion Falco encounters a Gaulish cook, which he finds ridiculous, as that country will never be famous for good food.
  • Two examples in Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle: Enoch Root's friend thinks tea is too esoteric for the English to ever warm up to, and Eliza mocks Jack's butchering of thaler into dollar.
  • In the Night Angel trilogy, King Logan says he wants to write a book about words. Not with words, about them. Telling what they mean. A Dictionary. Kylar doesn't buy it.
  • In Jericho Moon, set shortly after the Trojan War, a Canaanite prince excuses his never having learned Greek, because nothing worth reading ever has been, or likely will be, written in that language. Also, a caravan drover is considered crazy for insisting that his camels are "the ass of the future": everyone knows that those over-sized, smelly, bad-tempered beasts can't be domesticated.
  • The Wheel of Time does this once or twice, since it's hinted that it takes place in a past/future Earth. The funniest comes in The Great Hunt (not direct quotes, but close enough.

Thom Merrilin: They say they don't need my stories! Some fool out there is pretending to BE Gaidal Cain! (continued rant on how ridiculous the idea of theater is)

  • In Gathering Blue, Kira sees indoor plumbing for the first time, but thinks of it as impractical, since she sees simply going to the river easier.
  • Paris in The Twentieth Century has (or, more accurately, is) an out-of-universe version of this. One of the reasons it was initially rejected for publication was that Jules Verne's predictions about the far-off future of 1960 were considered wildly implausible. He got a few things wrong, but the gist of the novel is either clearly correct (horseless carriages!) or correct if you're cynical (Corrupt Corporate Executives run the world!).
  • In Mary Renault's The Praise Singer, Historical Domain Character Onomakritos gets caught forging prophecies. A few are described. The one about a lightning-flash from Macedon which would burn the Great King's throne is obvious nonsense, but the one about Atlantis rising in the west and aspiring to rule the moon, sending up heroes in flying chariots, is crazier still.[2]
  • Gerald Kersh's Comrade Death. The main character, tractor salesman turned Arms Dealer, is laughed at by his first client and friends because the idea of a weapon salesmen is ridiculous at the start of the 20th century.
  • In the final Time Scout novel, one unpleasant downtimer goes on a misogynist rant when he encounters a female uptime reporter. He particularly laments that women are taking mens' jobs, usurping respectable professions like the secretary, polluting the office with their wanton ways.
  • In the first Dragonology book, Dr. Drake comments that he thinks the designs the Wright Brothers are experimenting with are impractical and unlikely to ever work. Considering that he's an expert on DRAGONS, there may be some overlap with Arbitrary Skepticism.
  1. ↑ Engine for the Neutralizing of Information by the Generation of Miasmic Alphabets
  2. ↑ The book mentions one other prophecy, bud since it's taken from Herodotus's account of the whole business, it's much less interesting.
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