I'm trying to write an alternate history novel about the Y2K bug, where everything actually came apart as predicted. I need two things- a resource about daily life and culture in the 90's (fiction or nonfiction is fine), and a resource about what rich people do at parties.
Oh, and a plausible way to greatly reduce the amount of preparation there was for the bug. Right now I'm thinking a massive solar flare that they had to fix instead of the bug, but I'm open to other ideas.
The phrase "books set in the 1990s" comes up with a fair number of hits on Google. What exactly are you looking for? Edited to add: So does "1990s news stories". As someone who was an adult in the 1990s, I'm inclined to describe it as "today, but without smartphones". But I realize that there are no doubt a lot of other differences that don't immediately come to my mind.
I can't help you but I like your idea. Welcome to the forum. I have a collection of Y2K bugs. Not my photos but I have these guys.
I don't think you need to have them do less preparation. Plenty of people did not do enough preparation, which was part of why some people were pretty worried about it. You could probably try to google articles about Y2K tests -- a lot of tests showed electronic equipment that would simply stop working. There was a real fear that a lot of electronics would simply not work, and it wasn't just from people who buy into conspiracy theories and and were into doomsday preparation. There were people who knew about this stuff, and were not alarmist, but were concerned because there was a real possibility stuff would not work and would not be fixed in time. As far as real life and culture in the 90s -- well, it wasn't really so much different from now, except you didn't have all the social media. In the last part of the 1990s, people were starting to get email addresses, lots of people were on America Online and similar sites, and people were just starting to buy things online. Maybe you could watch some tv shows from the nineties to get some sense of people living without being connected all the time. (People were also just beginning to get cell phones, but often there was only maybe one per family, and they weren't used anywhere near as often as they are now.)
