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 Soylent Green (1973).

Soylent Green is an ecological dystopian detective conspiracy thriller (now there’s a combination), directed by Richard Fleischer and starring Charlton Heston, Leigh Taylor-Young and Edward G. Robinson. It presents a dystopian future of dying oceans, year-round humidity due to the greenhouse effect, overpopulation, pollution, poverty, and depleted resources (Richard H. Kline’s photography uses hazy green filters to vividly evoke a poisoned atmosphere). And it’s set in 2022...

The 1970s saw a series of socially critical, and sometimes dystopian, science fiction films, many of which seemed to share a sense of urgent alarm about the future we were heading towards (and now, of course, increasingly where we’ve arrived).

Soylent Green’s setting reflected a growing environmental consciousness over the previous decade, from Rachel Carson’s bestselling book Silent Spring, to a raft of new environmental regulations and the first Earth Day in 1970. Crucially, these concerns were shared by conservatives. But then a divide began to develop, between the new left’s adoption of a critical environmental conscious that pointed to the destructiveness of industrial capitalism, and the emerging new right that identified the threat from this consciousness and fought back fiercely.

Like the shocking truth revealed in the famous ending of Soylent Green, the truth of industrial civilization was too uncomfortable to face.

But to understand how all this played out, in both fact and fiction, 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.