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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/35765
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

As others have said, avoid references to our pop culture completely, and invent your own. I think this is an example of making the world of your book much larger than that shown: as if the book is a window into a much larger world, which of course it must be in order to be a convincing piece of science fiction. I've seen authors (George RR Martin perhaps?) invoke a 10x rule for this - that the book should show a tenth of the fictional world, in terms of characters and places, compared to what the author has devised.

[Dune](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dune_religions) is a good example of this, but with historical/religious references replacing pop culture: religious references (to different religions) are made frequently, with no explanation of what they mean. It's obvious that some of these religions are evolved from our own contemporary religions, but with many new elements.

Analogous to this, if you wanted your novel's world to feel like it still has some connection to our own, rather than being totally alien, you could "Mutate" current pop references into future ones, like people who worship statues of Carl Sagan or something like that. I think you would only need a small number of these.

Central to this approach, I think, is a glossary, for the reader who **does** want to understand the reference. Have a look at the glossary in Dune or Game Of Thrones - they feel like they were written by a historian living in the fictional world, often in a time **after** the period of the book, so that the events of the book have had time to be placed in a historical context (in this sense, the glossary can contain mild "spoilers", to some extent).

So, the road map could be:

- create the whole world (including places, characters, culture and history), and make sure none of it contradicts other parts.
- create the glossary based on that
- write your novel featuring some of the elements listed in the glossary, ensuring it fits with all the consistency established in your larger world.
- delete from the glossary (for your first novel at least) the elements that didn't happen to feature.

Obviously there's going to be a bit of back and forth, where as you write the story you have new ideas and change the world to fit. But the larger world can still act as a framework, to ensure consistency within the book.

Original score: 4