The (SF) Futures Left Behind

Cafe Society
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Since it’s 2015, which is the year that Marty McFly travels forward to in Back to the Future II, it’s gotten me to thinking about all the other SF futures that we’ve caught up with, or have already left behind.

The granddaddy of them all is 1984, of course: when I first read it as a 13 or 14 year old back in 1967 or 1968, 1984 was still a lot further into the future than I could remember into the past. Then we finally got to 1984, and it was just another year.

And there’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequels (one set in 2010, IIRC), and the general cluster of stuff around 2000, which represented The Future for so long (“it’s 2000; where’s my flying car?”)

Another SF touchstone for me has been Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. His Private Mandella is in basic training in, um, 1997. By 2007, he’s a sergeant, and off on his second engagement with the Taurans, which he doesn’t return from until 2024.

Escape from New York was also set in 1997. Escape from L.A. wasn’t until 2013. :wink:

Much of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles was set in 2005.

I’d exclude stuff like Jurassic Park that were set in what was, at the time, the present or very near future. If I were to write a novel set here on Earth as it gets afflicted with a devastating Ebola-like plague in the year 2018, I could just as well be talking about next week.

So what are your favorite futures that we’ve already left behind, or are catching up with?

Lost Futures
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“Three billion human lives ended on August 29th, 1997. The survivors of the nuclear fire called the war Judgment Day.” – Sarah Connor, Terminator 2.

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The timing on that one was doomed right from the start. He has a practical deep-space drive invented, developed, implemented, and launched on a manned mission within ten years after the writing of the book. Nothing is ever developed that fast.

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Yeah, but thanks to the time travel shenanigans in the Terminator series, the date of Judgement Day keeps getting moved up. (Though the most recent was 2011, I think, so it’s time to do it again.)

As a kid of the 80s, Robotech is the first example that comes to mind whenever this comes up…we’ve passed every major date of the Macross Saga, the major events of which begin in 1989 and end in 2014 - the most important dates being 1999 (SDF-1 crashes), 2009 (repaired SDF-1 launches, First Robotech War begins), 2010 (SDF-1 returns to Earth), 2011 (First Robotech War ends), 2013 (Zentraedi rebellion begins) and 2014 (Zentraedi rebellion ends, SDFs 1 and 2 destroyed).

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“The year is 1987, and NASA launches the last of America’s deep space probes; in a freak mishap, Ranger 3 and its pilot – Captain William ‘Buck’ Rogers – are blown out of their trajectory into an orbit which freezes his life support systems, and returns Buck Rogers to Earth . . . five . . . hundred . . . years . . . later.”

dundunDAANdundundundunDAANdundundundundundundundundunDAAN!

We’re all supposed to be living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland by now.

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“The Rocket of 1955” :slight_smile:

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Galactica 1980.
No flying motorcycles.

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From the Star Trek timeline:

1986: A pair of humpbacked whales and a whale biologist were kidnapped by alien(s) in an invisible spaceship.

1992: The Eugenics wars begin.

1996: The Eugenics wars end.

1999: Voyager 6 is launched (later to become V’ger)

2002: Interstellar probe Nomad is launched.

2009: First successful Earth-Saturn probe takes place.

2012: First self-sustaining civic environment, the Millenium Gate, which will be used as the model for the first habitat on Mars, completed in Portage Creek, Indiana.

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1997 also marked the launch of the Jupiter II, just two years before the explosion of the nuclear waste stockpiles blew the Moon out of orbit.

But this should be more for stories and not just events. Anyone know off-hand when Mad Max defeated Lord Humungous?

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Because I just used it in responding to another thread I have Everett F. Bleiler’s monumental Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years open next to me. He summarizes every science fiction story from 1926-1936, and indexes them by theme. That’s 1834 stories and is the shorter companion to Science Fiction: The Early Years. One of the entires in the index is The Future: Specific Year Dates. There are two full columns of years, with up to a dozen stories in each, before getting to what is now the present.

The entry for 2014 is “Adrift on a Meteor” by Jack Winks, in the Aug./Sept. 1933 Amazing. A sea yarn transferred bodily to space, the hero is sentenced to walk the plank but is given a space suit so he would suffer longer. He falls onto a meteor full of valuable ore and gets rescued. Contains “convincing space slang.”

The one for 2015 is by the legendary Stanley G. Weinbaum, “The Point of View,” from Wonder Stories, Feb. 1936. His madcap inventor, Professor van Manderpootz, creates a machine that lets one see the world from another person’s brain. Hijinks ensue.

If you have some other favorite years, I’ll look up a few stories for you.

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If you’d like to read some books about predicted futures that didn’t come to pass (mostly in nonfiction rather than fiction, I think), here are some books about such things:

Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future by Joseph J. Corn and Brian Horrigan

Popular Mechanics The Wonderful Future that Never Was: Flying Cars, Mail Delivery by Parachute, and Other Predictions from the Past by Gregory Benford

Wasn’t the Future Wonderful: A View of Trends and Technology from the 1930s by Tim Onosko

The Metropolis of Tomorrow by Hugh Ferriss (This one is a book from 1929 in which an architect predicts what future cities (i.e., today’s cities) will look like.)

Here’s a list of predictions that didn’t come to pass:

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Let’s not forget TV series like 1970’s UFO, set in 1980! Aliens visit us and blow up!

This led to Space: 1999! It was on TV in 1975. The moon is blasted out of its orbit and careens thru interstellar space as the inhabitants of its moonbase try to survive!

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Soylent Green is supposed to be developed this year; the movie is set in 2022. And the events of Blade Runner are now just four years off.

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This was actually the theme of a science fiction convention I co-chaired a few years back: Orycon 30-Days Of Futures Past. I know we got a few great panel suggestions from posters on the SDMB.

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In Fatal Instinct, a Kari Wuhrer SF film, there’s a title card that says: “2030: Aldeberan Women’s Correctional Facility.” The film was made sometime after 2000. Apparently the filmmaker believed that within 30 years we would have developed an FTL drive, colonized planets in other star systems, and of COURSE the first thing we’d do is build women’s prisons there! This one is not in the past yet, but really no sane person would buy that timeline back in 2000, much less now.

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When the aliens show up next year, carting our wimminfolk off for crimes against fashion, you’ll feel awfully silly.

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She was kinda asking for it, going around calling herself Miss Universe like that.

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In Max Beerbohm’s 1916 short story, “Enoch Soames”, the title character appears in the British Library reading room on the third of June, 1997. Teller (of Penn and Teller) was there to make sure he arrived as scheduled.

In Looking Backward, Mr. Julian West slept until “the tenth day of September in the year 2000”.

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Death Race 2000!

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I thought we were getting into the Blade Runner timeframe, but I just checked and Roy Batty’s incept date isn’t until next January (1/8/16 - we’ll have to mark it on our calendars.)