Dates In Fiction

As Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series progressed, it became usual to begin each narrative passage with a heading informing the reader of the date of the events to be recounted. Thus:

the opening section of "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" is headed 372;

the opening section of "The Year of the Ransom" is headed 10 September 1987;

the opening chapter of The Shield Of Time is headed 1987 A. D.;

the opening section of "Death and the Knight" is headed PARIS, TUESDAY, 10 OCTOBER 1307.

The information is presented in a slightly different way in each case.

Dates are of interest even when the narrative does not involve time travel.

"When the first of these things happened, that is to say upon the twentieth day of April, 192-, I was twenty-two years old..."
-Dornford Yates, Blind Corner (London, 1947), CHAPTER I, p. 9.

The last novel narrated by Richard Chandos is set some time after World War II.

CHAPTER 1 of Stieg Larsson's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is headed Friday, 20.xii. Thus, we know that it is five days before Christmas in a year when Christmas is on a Wednesday. Later, we are told the year:

"'Mikael Blomkvist was born on 18 January, 1960, which makes him forty-three years old.'"
-Stieg Larsson, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (London, 2008), CHAPTER 2, p. 44. 

(But see the attached calendar.) (But the one-day discrepancy will mean that it is on the other side of the date line.)

This is twenty-first century fiction which would once have been science fiction.