Near-future Science Fiction...

By Wreybies · Apr 10, 2020 · 580 · 6
  1. ... never pans out. Ever. The original timeline for Blade Runner has come and gone. Priss, Roy, and the rest, had they not been retired by Decker, will have hit their expiration dates. So what is the point of the near-future story that paints an ultra-fantastic world just a couple of decades in the future?

    In a couple of decades, a huge of swath of you in the USA will still be living in homes built during the post-war boom and also the 80's housing boom. No swish-swish Star Trek doors and "smart homes" - let's face it - will still be the territory of the very rich and will not include AI's running your home. Not AI's in the Sci-Fi sense of the word, but maybe in the current down-shifted meaning, which is a far cry from a HAL9000 or a Samantha.

    I don't have an answer for the why of the near-future trope. I am usually deeply suspicious of the reasons people give for needing to give a hard date. It's rarely more solid than "I want it to feel like it's not so far way" one often hears. Okay, but why? So much Science Fiction never gives a date, just the revised living situations and things seem to trundle along just fine.

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  1. jannert
    Children of Men is the one that might work ...even if the event itself doesn't happen (and hopefully it won't.) It's not painting a fantastic future at all. In fact, it's kinda the present deteriorating a bit more than it is at the moment ...although we're getting there. I don't think that one is going to 'date' as much as some of the others have.
    jannert, Apr 10, 2020
      Wreybies and Oscar Leigh like this.
  2. big soft moose
    we feel remarkably close to v for vendetta at times "you went to porton down... but that's outside quarantine"... that aside its fiction so I'm not sure it matters, none of these films or books are sold as an accurate prediction of what life will be like on x date
    big soft moose, Apr 10, 2020
  3. O.M. Hillside
    I would say 1984 -- which is a sci-fi/dystopian novel -- got a lot of things about our current environment pretty accurate.
    O.M. Hillside, Apr 11, 2020
  4. Iain Aschendale
    But putting a definite, near-ish term date on your work can give you a residual bump if you do it right. If I retire at 65 (hah!) that means I want to set my WIP in 2035-ish so that if it has any modicum of initial success younger people will hear about it for the first time when whatever Facebook or Twitter have been replace by starts babbling about how nothing worked out the way Aschendale thought it would. More sales at a key point in my life, thanks my right honorable dude!
    Iain Aschendale, Apr 11, 2020
      Wreybies and Some Guy like this.
  5. Iain Aschendale
    Watching OG Star Trek. Khan ruled a quarter of the Earth's population from 1992-1996.
    Iain Aschendale, Apr 12, 2020
  6. minstrel
    But it isn’t about the actual date. It’s about the social/political/economic scenario when it’s close to ours here and now. It’s all about “If this goes on…” Climate change, for example. If this goes on, and we don’t adopt clean energy, where do we wind up? Or government control of information. We already have Trump and his people telling climate scientists that they’re not allowed to use certain words in their publications. How far are we, then, from Newspeak? We’ll be calling things doubleplusgood before you know it.
    Robocop and other stories of its ilk are cautionary tales about what happens when we leave our system of justice up to machines. It’s depicted as close enough to our time and society that it scares us.
    On the other hand, Star Trek is set so far in the future it’s unrecognizable to us. It seems that all human social problems have been solved - no racism, no sexism, no totalitarianism. Earth has become a paradise. We have stupendous technology. We roam the galaxy like prophets of peace and enlightenment, confident that our societal mores, our philosophies, our ways of being generally, are superior to any race’s we discover in our travels. In other words, Star Trek humans are nothing like us. Hence, very far in the future.
    I’m loathe to bring this up, but Ayn Rand, talking about Atlas Shrugged, said that it was supposed to take place thirty years after you read it. No hard dates; just in the middle future - a future well beyond where we are, but still within our lifetimes. I read the dates in things like 2001 and Blade Runner that way. They’re not absolute; they’re just in that middle future, near enough to scare us, to wake us up.
    minstrel, Apr 12, 2020
      Simpson17866 and Iain Aschendale like this.
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