My new book, Come With Me If You Want To Live: The Future as Foretold in Classic Sci-Fi Films, is out in November. It’s a timely one, I think (unfortunately) – about how the future, particularly dystopian futures, have been depicted in science fiction films and why ‘we’ haven’t have taken these visions seriously enough.

Here in the 2020s, we’ve reached the point depicted in many sci-fi films of the past fifty years. Reviewers love to point out what sci-fi stories got wrong (‘where’s my flying car?’ etc). But my book focuses on what many of these films were really warning us about - the dystopian future(s) - and how in these respects they were fundamentally right.

Last year, 2022, was also the fiftieth anniversary of the most important report most people might never heard of, The Limits to Growth. A media sensation at the time for predicting social collapse, it’s still unnervingly prescient about our present and helps to explain what’s happening now.

The book uses blockbuster and cult classic sci-fi films to describe what’s coming next – in politics, economics, technology, the environment, and our day-to-day lives (I’ll briefly introduce the selected films in later blog posts). It shows how the predictions contained in studies such as The Limits to Growth are now coming true (indeed, The Limits to Growth even directly informed some of the films I discuss in the book).

So, we can’t say we weren’t warned, including by some of the best science fiction films of the past fifty years, which I use in the book to discuss what’s going to happen next. I also uncover the sometimes surprising yet hidden-in-plain-sight meanings of these films – meanings that are, however else some of these films might seem dated, now more relevant than ever (inevitably, there are major spoilers for the films, if you haven’t seen them already).

Of course, the films represent a personal collection of favorites, but, I hope, also a pretty good selection based on their predictive power, for their ability to foresee the future. In addition, they’re a way of telling the story presented in the book, of how we lost the future, or rather how it was taken from us.

Indeed, at times they become part of the story itself; in some cases their dramatized warnings were (and still are) dismissed as alarmist, even part of a progressive ‘plot’ to end progress and immiserate millions. Obviously, their inclusion in the book is intended to indicate that they shouldn’t have been dismissed at the time, and neither should they now.

So, the book is really less about how dystopias have warned us about some distant, possible future, and more what they’ve told us (and still can tell us) about the fast-oncoming, increasingly probable present.

Some might say, 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 included in the book predicted, the future is becoming less unknown.

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 as I argue in the book, 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.

Come With Me If You Want To Live is the history of why we didn’t get the future we were promised, and who is responsible for this – but how we will get the future that was predicted fifty years ago. It’s not the future their creators wanted then, or we want now (most of us, anyway). But the more we understand what’s coming, the more we might be able to prepare for it.

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.