I've started Doomsday and am about 100 pages or so in, and one thing that has really struck me so far is how dated certain things in the "near future" feel despite the book being written relatively recently. I expect it of old sci-fi books and films, or even those 70s ones (I even just watched a really fantastic 70s German sci-fi film about virtual reality called "World on a Wire", but I digress), but one from the 90s? It's a little jarring!
In the author's defence though, near-future sci-fi would have to be the easiest fiction to become quickly dated, and we can't expect her to have predicted the absolute dominance of mobile phones and the internet. But it is the phones in particular that are so funny about this future, mainly because they're such an important plot element over and over again these first 100 pages. I find it entertaining though, and I basically imagine this as an alternate history where mobile phones and the internet as we know it never happened, a sort of unintentional nouveau-steampunk maybe ("landlinepunk"?
).