The (SF) Futures Left Behind

Cafe Society
61

Well, it means they can take a load off building the back story. Tell me it’s “2035”, and I imagine that things are mostly the same. The US still exists, Russia is still a mess, and Disney is still making Mickey Mouse crap.

Tell me it’s hundreds or thousands of years in the future, or even just “unspecified date”, and I have to wonder why all the cultural touchstones are the same. So you either have to explain why nothing has changed, or show how everything has changed. If all you really want to do is tell a good story about trying to stop a rouge Saturnian ring from destroying Washington D.C., that’s a pain in the ass.

62

Look! My idea is already part of the zeitgeist.

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Thank my lucky star!

63

I thought the rings of Saturn are mainly yellow and orangeish.

64

You don’t give a date, though, just put up a card that explains it’s “20 minutes into the future” or “sometime in the future”.

65

Are you saying that in our timeline, it was successful?

66

I think you have to actually exist to be considered “successful.”

67

At the age of fourteen I wrote a SF story about a terrorist attack on the Munich Olympics in the then-future year of 1972.

Admittedly, in my story they used lasers, and the moral of this story is, don’t rely on SF to predict the future.

68

A neutron star, which turns out to be inhabited by tiny sentient aliens who evolved under immense gravity, is discovered in the constellation Draco by Earth astronomers in 2020 in Robert L. Forward’s 1980 sf novel Dragon’s Egg.

69

For one thing, it sounds good. And fits natural language; too much avoidance of specific dates can start to sound weird.

Also, the “Year 2000 effect”; dating major events in and around that date was really popular in sci-fi for decades.

70

Bumped.

Today we reached a future date written about by Ray Bradbury:

And see: There Will Come Soft Rains (short story) - Wikipedia

71

They did that with Max Headroom, with the original idea of each episode being five minutes long. By the time it got to TV, the episodes were 30 minutes, which meant by the end of each epsiode we were already ten minutes past 20 minutes into the future.

See how tricky it can get?

72

I’m reminded of Streets of Fire, the 1984 action-musical-tragic-love-story “rock & roll fairy tale” movie where the title card simply says “Another time, another place” to describe its setting - a nameless American city with '50s cars and music, '70s urban blight, and '80s fashion sensibilities.

73

Besides dates, there’s a lot of sci-fi that was rendered obsolete by the collapse of the USSR. The Mickey Mouse Olympics by Thomas Sullivan for example was published in Omni in 1979, and involved a Disney-sponsored Olympics where the rivalry between the US and USSR was a core plot point. Nobody really expected the USSR to just go away like it did.

74

2010: Odyssey Two, the Arthur C. Clarke novel and the movie based on it, both feature a joint U.S.-Soviet space mission that year.

The ST:TNG episode “The Naked Now,” set in 2364, also makes (a hard to spot) reference to the USSR: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Baikonur_Cosmodrome

75

The book Armageddon 2419 introduced the character who became Buck Rogers. But his name was not William it was Anthony. The book never called him Buck either, but sometimes he was called Tony.

76

I remember watching a bootleg copy of Batman (the one with Michael Keaton) in Russia back in 1990. The guy I was with (a Russian and a good friend) couldn’t understand what '30s-style gangsters with Tommy guns were doing in what was supposed to be the present day, and why what was obviously NYC looked so Gothic.

77

In the awful 1987 miniseries Ameяika, Sam Neill, playing a Russian officer, says the USSR never expected the US to “just give up.”

That’s right, the United States surrendered to the Soviet Union right in the middle of Ronald Reagan’s second term!

78

I liked seeing the name of the ship printed in Cyrillic on its commissioning plaque.