Here’s the afterword from my new book, about how classic science fiction has in many ways predicted the future we’re now increasingly living in:

At the end of Terminator 2, we’re travelling down a highway at night, again. Sarah says, “The unknown future rolls towards us. I face it for the first time with a sense of hope. Because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.”

As Jonathan Lear writes in Radical Hope (2006), “What makes… hope radical is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends [our] current ability to understand what [that] is.” In every moment, there are always routes to different futures.

Terminator 2 originally ended even more optimistically. We’re in a playground again, but thirty years in the future (in other words, just about now). Sarah watches children playing, including an adult John playing with his own daughter:

“August 29, 1997, came and went. Nothing much happened. …People went to work as they always do. Laughed, complained, watched TV, made love. I wanted to run to through the street yelling to grab them all and say, “Every day from this day on is a gift. Use it well.” Instead, I got drunk. …But the dark future which never came still exists for me. And it always will, like the traces of a dream. John fights the war differently than it was foretold. Here, on the battlefield of the Senate, his weapons were common sense and hope. The luxury of hope was given me by the Terminator. Because if a machine can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.”

In contrast to some of the other films we’ve discussed, it was the studio that wanted a more ambiguous ending. Mario Kassar, the lead producer, felt it was too neat, too positive compared to the dark tone of the rest of the story, as if it came from a different film (a more open ending, implying that the struggle for the future is an ongoing one, would also more easily allow for sequels). Test audiences agreed, and James Cameron relented.

This book has been less about how dystopias have warned us about some distant, possible future, and more what they’ve told us about the fast-oncoming, increasingly probable present. Since we’re here now, it might be time to move on from fictional dystopias. Obviously, good sci-fi continues to be produced, and consumed, as it should. But, we might ask, what do they really tell us that we don’t already know – about ecological catastrophe, class exploitation, and technological hubris? Just as the films highlighted here predicted, the future is becoming less unknown. Paradoxically, ‘no fate but that we make is right’ is correct – but only if we first accept the reality of the world, and of the world soon to come.

This doesn’t mean it’s over. There might be no future emergency for which we must prepare. Dystopia is here already for some people – it has been for a long time – and for more of us soon. Magical technologies won’t save us, nor will charismatic leaders touting simplistic solutions. But creativity, communities, and commitment will help to save some of us, in some times and places. Just how many times and places, and how many people, is still up to us.

And while much of the argument here has been about inevitability, about the unavoidability of crisis and collapse, there are also better things we can’t anticipate, maybe can’t even begin to imagine. There are the things we don’t yet know – ideas, organizations, movements, ways of living and working and more – in the minds and hearts of new generations who are growing up in collapse and (yet) still want to build better, safer, fairer futures.

In Terminator: Dark Fate, Grace (Mackenzie Davis), a human augmented future super soldier, grabs Sarah’s phone to figure out the geographical coordinates of an anonymous text message sent to the device. “What are you doing?”, asks Sarah. Not wanting to waste time trying to explain her advanced knowledge, Grace responds, “Future shit.”

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