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.