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Comment by amayne | Hacker News Reader

It's very common in YA, but was extremely rare a decade ago.

I don’t read any YA. It’s mostly classic sci-fi, and some detective stories and occasional political thriller here and there. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention, but the only time I recall past tense stories is when a character is describing something that happened off-scene. Narration is always present tense.

I can think of a handful of exceptions where the whole story itself is narrated from the perspective of someone telling a story, but those are notable exceptions for having a weird narrative gimmick (e.g. the excellent but dated Icehenge is written in the past tense because it consists of personal diary entries).

I’m the opposite. I can’t recall a single example of a novel I have read in the present tense.

Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, etc., almost exclusively wrote in the past tense. Did you mean a past tense framing device instead?

Yes, I thought the article (which I only skimmed) was talking about framing devices. That's what "the story is told in past tense" means to me. I guess I don't really pay attention to tense, because I just opened a Clarke on my bedside table, and the verbs are past tense. Thanks for the correction.

This reminds me of how I go through a lot of trouble to pick a seat in a movie theater, but after it’s over and if I really enjoyed it, I couldn’t tell you if I sat in the front or off to the side.

Good storytelling just pulls you in. Our brain fills in the rest.

This comment is blowing my mind. Please name some other books you’ve read. It would be astonishing if you’d somehow avoided the most common tense in literature your whole life!

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