The future has arrived, pretty much on schedule
Here’s a list of the classic sci-fi films I focus on in my book, and the (primary) places and years in which they’re set:
Back to the Future Part II – Hill Valley, 1955 / 1985 (both a and b versions) / 2015
Terminator 2: Judgment Day – Los Angeles, 1995 / 2029
Rollerball – Houston, 2018
Blade Runner – Los Angeles, 2019
Soylent Green – New York City, 2022
V For Vendetta – England, 2028
12 Monkeys – Philadelphia and Baltimore, 2035 (and 1990, 1996, World War I…)
Brazil – Britain, “Somewhere in the 20th Century”
Colossus: The Forbin Project – Colorado, year unspecified but the original book is set in the 1990s
Which is to say, we’re now living in (or have lived through, in some cases) some of the years depicted in these films. So how successful were they in predicting our future (present)?
When we ask this question, we might think first about the technologies they did or didn’t anticipate. Indeed, the fact that our future-present doesn’t include flying cars has been used by some so-called accelerationists to argue for a more ‘pro-technology’ (really meaning, deregulatory) approach to deliver the ‘future we were promised’ by sci-fi.
This focus on technology is understandable (it is science fiction, after all), but it also distracts us from what the more socially serious, critical sci-fi I focus on in the book was really about, namely the environmental, social, and political futures we were heading towards, and now where we’ve nearly arrived. Sci-fi dystopias are usually comfortably decades in the future. Until suddenly, they’re not.
Perhaps then the more important question I discuss in the book is why our fictional depictions of the future largely haven’t changed ever since some of these landmark films were released – why, in the most important respects, have they been proved essentially correct? To this, my answer is that these fictional futures persist, especially cyberpunk themed, environmentally depleted, corporate dominated, grossly unequal dystopias, because the conceivable future hasn’t changed. This is why films such as Blade Runner haven’t really dated – because we didn’t change course from the future(s) they depicted.
But why then didn’t we listen to their warnings?
In the 2015 movie Tomorrowland (named after the once-futuristic land in Disney theme parks), the character played by Hugh Laurie, the governor of a once fantastical city which is now in a state of decay, laments the failure of his plan to prevent a catastrophic future by projecting images of disaster to humanity as a warning. Instead, as he notes, “They didn’t fear their demise, they repackaged it. It can be enjoyed as video games, as TV shows, books, movies. The entire world wholeheartedly embraced the apocalypse and sprinted towards it with gleeful abandon.”
Perhaps this is part of it, and some critics and commentators have certainly blamed dystopian fiction for today’s widespread pessimism about the future (at least in many Western nations). And yet, it’s not the job of creators of popular culture to promote positive visions of the future absent the factors that could help to make these visions come true. The only ‘responsibility’ of creators is to tell the truth, at least how they see it – that, for example, the climate emergency, long predicted by often-derided and dismissed environmental ‘doomists’ since the 1970s, has surely, undeniably now begun.
It’s not then a failing of creators’ imaginations (let alone a conspiracy of despair) that we’re stuck in dystopian visions of the future, it’s that politically, economically, and socially we’ve essentially been stuck on the same trajectory towards futures that are decidedly dystopian. Moreover, the fears expressed in some 1970s sci-fi have turned from predictions into descriptions - not because we heeded their concerns, but because we didn’t. This is the world that sci-fi ‘promised’ us, not a future of flying cars.
So, welcome to 2024!
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.