Fiction

details weirdly wrong. It's 1973, and he has the landlady casually microwaving soup. I don't recall seeing a microwave oven in anyone's kitchen until several years later, and that in the household of someone fairly affluent. And it was a big deal that she had it.

The same landlady cautions the narrator to always use rubber gloves because of diseases. Really? While doctors have been using rubber gloves for a very, very long time, mainly when doing surgery, the general public didn't have a sense that they should wear them when cleaning up vomit or blood until the AIDS epidemic hit, nearly a decade after this conversation takes place.

He also has people presciently saying smoking will get banned more and more in the future, and there will be lots more regulations about things to come.

I'm being reminded of too many pre WWI novels I've read in which some character or another is predicting the imminent coming of a terrible war. And by pre WWI novels I do NOT mean ones written before 1914, but ones written well after in which the foreknowledge is too obviously planted by the author.