My forthcoming book discusses the dominance of dystopian visions of the future, which is hardly surprising given the multiple, overlapping environmental, economic, and political crises we face. In the book, I use nine classic sci-fi movies to discuss various aspects of the coming dystopia. One of them is the Back to the Future series.

This might seem a strange choice – but Back to the Future is especially smart, as well as entertaining, about how the past can lead to a dilapidated, dystopian future.

Arguably, only Back to the Future: Part II is science fiction, although the trilogy as a whole hinges on the genre trope of an advanced new technology, in this case time travel, that becomes a hazard with all sorts of unintended consequences. But that’s just a plot device. Really, all of the films are about utopia and dystopia, not always in the obvious way of films like Blade Runner, but in important ways nonetheless.

When we ask, ‘what happened to the future?’, we might at first think about the near-magical technologies that we (older generations, at least) were seemingly ‘promised’, including flying cars. But there’s something more important underlying these technological visions which also hasn’t happened: a shared increasing prosperity, ever-increasing leisure time facilitated by new technologies, investment in shiny, efficient cities, and a dynamic but organized future.

Most of all, we’re missing the optimism founded in ongoing social progress. It’s the decline of this optimism, among other things, that Back to the Future brilliantly depicts – and even more, that the particular middle-class American promise of utopia may always have been a lie, and its decline has sown the seeds of its coming (and increasingly present) dystopia. But to understand exactly why, you’ll have to read the book!

Come With Me If You Want To Live: The Future as Foretold in Classic Sci-Fi Films, is out in November from Lexington Books. You can read more about it here.