# The (SF) Futures Left Behind **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [January 1, 2015, 12:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-sf-futures-left-behind/708674 "2015-01-01T12:59:44Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Sherrerd](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sherrerd/32/8_2.png) [@Sherrerd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sherrerd)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2015, 11:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-sf-futures-left-behind/708674/21 "2015-01-01T23:01:42Z")
A good chunk of Heinlein’s “Future History” years have already passed–Luna City would long since have been settled, and whatnot. > [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > …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. Well, that _could_ happen in 2014 (or 2015), I guess, if someone in the International Space Station took September 19th too seriously. ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2015, 11:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-sf-futures-left-behind/708674/22 "2015-01-01T23:20:33Z")
The Time Tunnel would have been operational for the last 46 years. Hopefully they’d have had all the bugs worked out by now and gotten Doug and Tony back. Now I understand why so few episodes of that show were set in the future… :smack: ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2015, 11:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-sf-futures-left-behind/708674/23 "2015-01-01T23:25:06Z")
[The future that never was](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=621822) ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2015, 12:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-sf-futures-left-behind/708674/24 "2015-01-02T00:00:45Z")
Sleeper ships like the _Botany Bay_ are only going to be used until around 2018, so I guess we can expect Zefram Cochrane to announce the discovery of the space warp any day now! Oh, wait … we haven’t had WWIII yet. Damn! :mad: Missed Colonel Christopher’s 2009 mission to Saturn, too. Crap! ☹ ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_Bravo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_bravo/32/493_2.png) [@Johnny\_Bravo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Bravo)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2015, 12:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-sf-futures-left-behind/708674/25 "2015-01-02T00:10:49Z")
The year: 1994. From out of space comes a runaway planet, hurtling between the Earth and the Moon, unleashing cosmic destruction! Man’s civilization is cast in ruin! Two thousand years later, Earth is reborn. A strange new world rises from the old: a world of savagery, super science and sorcery. But one man bursts his bonds to fight for justice! With his companions Ookla the Mok and Princess Ariel, he pits his strength, his courage, and his fabulous Sunsword against the forces of evil. He is Thundarr, the Barbarian! ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2015, 12:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-sf-futures-left-behind/708674/26 "2015-01-02T00:14:42Z")
Never got to ride in the Flying Sub when I was in high school, either. Damn, damn, damn, damn! :mad: ---
**Author:** ![TBG](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c89c15/32.png) [@TBG](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TBG)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2015, 1:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-sf-futures-left-behind/708674/27 "2015-01-02T01:23:10Z")
Transformers the Movie was set in 2005. The Lisa’s Wedding episode of the Simpsons was set in 2010 (well, the future parts anyway). I think most of the other flash forward eps have been careful to not give a specific year. ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2015, 6:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-sf-futures-left-behind/708674/28 "2015-01-02T18:05:22Z")
Heh, we had exactly that discussion on New Year’s… And to be honest, 2015 really still sounds quite futuristic to me. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2015, 6:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-sf-futures-left-behind/708674/29 "2015-01-02T18:33:11Z")
I have an anthology from a few years back all set in the year 2000 - I think the title is The Year 2000, and I believe it was edited by Harry Harrison. Can find no sign of it on Amazon. Popular for us because one of the stories had the lead character use PLATO. In the 50s the default time for the first trip to the moon seemed to be 1975 - that was the date at the beginning of **Childhood’s End** at least. One of the few cases where reality beat sf. ---
**Author:** ![Son\_of\_a\_Rich](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/son_of_a_rich/32/5439_2.png) [@Son\_of\_a\_Rich](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Son_of_a_Rich)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2015, 6:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-sf-futures-left-behind/708674/30 "2015-01-02T18:59:33Z")
> [@Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](#): > > This led to [Space: 1999](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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! Science fiction television series have often been bad, but that one takes the prize for having a aggressively stupid premise. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2015, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-sf-futures-left-behind/708674/31 "2015-01-02T19:14:34Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > I have an anthology from a few years back all set in the year 2000 - I think the title is The Year 2000, and I believe it was edited by Harry Harrison. Can find no sign of it on Amazon. Popular for us because one of the stories had the lead character use PLATO. [The Year 2000](http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?50677). ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2015, 7:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-sf-futures-left-behind/708674/32 "2015-01-02T19:18:45Z")
Good Lord, but there are WAY too many of these to list. All those SF stories from the Golden Age of the 1930s-1940s that are set around 2000 or earlier have now been overtaken by events. So have the books of the 1950s. Fredric Brown’s \*\* The Lights in the Sky are Stars\*\* and Heinlein’s **The Puppet Masters** and several by Arthur C. Clarke have certainly failed to come to pass – no easy interplanetary travel or toroidal space stations or Moon bases. This is a fairly easy game, based as it is on our poore estimattions of how rapidly some trends and technologies change, and getting them significantly too fast or too slow, while overlooking the unforeseen. Who would’ve thought that digital electronics would supplant analog so completely (bye-bye, you Drive Cams used by Heinlein in “Space Ship Galileo” and George O. Smith in his “Venus Equilateral” stories), or that computers would become so ubiquitous, small, and fast (No one predicted Moore’s Law), or the failure (despite suggestions by Wells, Clarke, and Leinster that even they didn’t really take to heart) to anticipate The Internet. Et Cetera Et Cetera Ad Nauseam. I could go through my collection of SF to ferret out these failures of prediction, but why bother? As Exapno and others have pointed out, although a lot of SF posits a possible future, it’s generally not the main point of the story, SF writers aren’t Futurologists (or, in most cases, really trying to be). Hugo Gernsback, in his _Ralph 124C41+_ series, really WAS trying to predict future trends, and he managed to get it spectacularly wrong for the most part (seen through solid metal lately?) Have a look at the 1939 World’s Fair Futurama “World of 1960”: [http://www.wired.com/2013/11/design-fiction-futurama-1939-new-york-worlds-fair-to-new-horizons/](http://www.wired.com/2013/11/design-fiction-futurama-1939-new-york-worlds-fair-to-new-horizons/) The GM Futurama Vision of the Future 25 years later at the 1964 World’s Fair looks similarly quaint now. ---
**Author:** ![CaptMurdock](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/captmurdock/32/11736_2.png) [@CaptMurdock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CaptMurdock)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2015, 7:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-sf-futures-left-behind/708674/33 "2015-01-02T19:54:57Z")
> [@terentii](#): > > Never got to ride in the Flying Sub when I was in high school, either. Damn, damn, damn, damn! :mad: No worries. We’ve still got 38 years before [Pacifica has to launch the missile strike to deflect the planetoid!](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065556/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1) 😃 ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2015, 8:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-sf-futures-left-behind/708674/34 "2015-01-02T20:33:51Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > In the 50s the default time for the first trip to the moon seemed to be 1975 - that was the date at the beginning of **Childhood’s End** at least. One of the few cases where reality beat sf. I can think of a few others. From _The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress_: > [@](#): > > Human brain has around ten-to-the-tenth neurons. By third year Mike had better than one and one half times that number of neuristors. Let’s see: a million is 10^6, a billion is 10^9, so Mike has \>15 billion ‘neuristors,’ which are presumably semi-analogous to neurons. And he’s easily the biggest computer on Luna. I’ve got a terabyte USB drive that fits in my shirt pocket. (“Is that a terabyte in your pocket or are you glad to see me?”) That’s more than a trillion bytes. Since a byte is eight bits, which means it can take on 256 different values, it’s probably not an unreasonable equivalence to those neuristors. So I’ve arguably got a bigger memory than Mike’s in my pocket. And of course the NSA has computers that make my terabyte hard drive look like the memory of a 1970s pocket calculator, which would also leave Mike’s memory and computational capacity in the dust. And we still have 60 years for Moore’s Law to keep on working between now and 2075. (However, Heinlein’s next sentence after what I included in the quote box, “And woke up,” obviously hasn’t happened, and it’s debatable as to whether it ever will. “True AI,” like nuclear fusion, seems to be one of those things that’s likely to stay 30 years in the future until it either suddenly happens, or people come to realize it’s impossible.) Similarly, consider the Web. It’s different from the Net of David Brin’s 1989 novel _Earth_, set in 2038, but it seems to be of equivalent complexity. So we have computers way more powerful than Mike, and a Web roughly as good as that predicted for 2038, but no flying cars, and no Mr. Fusion to power our DeLoreans. Win some, lose some. ---
**Author:** ![Sherrerd](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sherrerd/32/8_2.png) [@Sherrerd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sherrerd)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2015, 8:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-sf-futures-left-behind/708674/35 "2015-01-02T20:46:53Z")
> [@RTFirefly](#): > > … So we have computers way more powerful than Mike, and a Web roughly as good as that predicted for 2038, but no flying cars, and no Mr. Fusion to power our DeLoreans. Win some, lose some. Arguably, both Moore’s Law _and_ the development of the Internet owe a large proportion of their power to the urge to view/participate in…a certain activity. What derailed _all_ the SF predictions was our resistance to recognizing the power of pornography as a motivator. ---
**Author:** ![Ethilrist](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ethilrist/32/4604_2.png) [@Ethilrist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ethilrist)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2015, 1:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-sf-futures-left-behind/708674/36 "2015-01-04T13:22:12Z")
> [@RTFirefly](#): > > (However, Heinlein’s next sentence after what I included in the quote box, “And woke up,” obviously hasn’t happened… “Ixnay.” – The Adolescence of P1 ---
**Author:** ![Meurglys](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/258eb7/32.png) [@Meurglys](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Meurglys)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2015, 1:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-sf-futures-left-behind/708674/37 "2015-01-05T13:18:15Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > 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: > > [List of dates predicted for apocalyptic events - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events) Thanks; for the list of books; I’ve just ordered the 1st one! The Benford one is good fun but I don’t know the 3rd one, it seems to be out of print. The Hugh Ferriss book is interesting but mainly b&w sketches of future buildings, iirc. Giant skyscrapers, overpasses, etc. > [@Miss\_Mapp](#): > > 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.) I could be mis-remembering after so long but I recollect reading a piece about the making of the film after it came out in which they said that the dates in new printings of the novel by Dick were altered to match the ones in the film. The original dates were too close to reality by the time the film was made so they pushed them several years into the future. No cite but my memory. _Stand on Zanzibar_ by **John Brunner** started on toDAY third of MAY twenty-TEN. ---
**Author:** ![cmkeller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmkeller/32/118_2.png) [@cmkeller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmkeller)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2015, 1:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-sf-futures-left-behind/708674/38 "2015-01-05T13:39:20Z")
In DC Comics, I believe the nuclear war from the old Atomic Knights series happened in 1986. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2015, 2:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-sf-futures-left-behind/708674/39 "2015-01-05T14:42:44Z")
The dates in _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?_ were pushed forward in later editions of the book, but it’s not clear to me if it had anything to do with the movie. The book was published in 1968 and was originally set in 1992. Current editions of the book are set in 2021. Surely by the 1980’s it was obvious that the only way the world of the book could exist would be if it was in a considerably further future. By now though, it should be obvious that it couldn’t exist in 2021 either: > **[Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Androids_Dream_of_Electric_Sheep%3F)** > > Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (retrospectively titled Blade Runner: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in some later printings) is a dystopian science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick, first published in 1968. The novel is set in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco, where Earth's life has been greatly damaged by a nuclear global war, leaving most animal species endangered or extinct. The main plot follows Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who has to "retire" (i.e. kill) six escap... ---
**Author:** ![Meurglys](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/258eb7/32.png) [@Meurglys](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Meurglys)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2015, 2:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-sf-futures-left-behind/708674/40 "2015-01-05T14:58:43Z")
My 30+ year old recollection is that the first re-dated version was the film tie-in edition, which was called _Blade Runner_, with ‘previously titled _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep_’ in smaller print on the bottom of the cover. I’m not aware of his other books being updated in a similar manner\*, so the film’s release seems to me to be the stimulus here. - just checked the SF Masterworks edition of _Ubik_ and it opens on the night of 5th June 1992, so it’s set as far ahead as _Do Androids Dream_… Similarly, _Martian Time-Slip_ is set in 1994 [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-sf-futures-left-behind/708674.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-sf-futures-left-behind/708674.md?page=3)