Being a fare bit past the YEAR 2000! I just know that there must have been a ton of dates in science fiction that have now become out-of-date. Most notable, 2001: A Space Odyssey, still no mission to Jupiter, and no self-aware machines. I know that there have been a bunch in the Star Trek universe, stuff like that Kahn (AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHNNNNNN!!!) was supposed to have conquered a fourth of humanity by something like 1994.
Can you guys remember any other dates from famous sci-fi that was written when the year 2000 was still many decades off?
NOTE: I am not talking about predictions here. Nothing about how some scientist said we would all have robot butlers by now, I mean stuff like a story that says that WW3 ended in 1987.
The events that set off 12 Monkeys were supposed to occur about three months after the film was released- or was it all in his mind?!?!?!?!?!?!?!? :eek:
Heinlein’s The Door Into Summer started off in 1970, at which time the Nuclear War had already been fought, and he slept through to 2000, by which time cheap transmutation of gold had been developed (1987 I think was the date for that).
And “Robbie”, the first of Asimov’s robot stories, was set in 1999.
Strange Days was set at… the turn of the millennium, I think. It was very odd watching it recently to hear the guy on the phone in radio show talking about “2K”, and the DJ, mere days or hours from New Year’s Eve, getting him to explain what he meant. I think the film was released before the Y2K problem though.
Viz magazine once ran a very funny piece about how the government was issuing an official apology for everything futuristic not being properly in place by the year 2000. Cities on the moon, etc. The new official date for all that stuff was declared to be 2020.
“The Apple” (1980) was set in 1994.
Moonbase Alpha (“Space 1999” (1975) went out of orbit (along with the moon) on September 13, 1999.
“UFO” (1970) was set in 1980.
The Jupiter II spaceship in “Lost in Space” (1965) took off in September 1997.
Yep. August 29, I believe. I don’t remember exactly off the top of my head.
Actually, that date is how you access one of the easter eggs on the T2 DVD. Punching in the date Skynet takes over gets you the movie branching into the original ending.
According to Contact, a proto-civilization created a galactic (and maybe even intergalactic) network of wormholes billions of years ago…they also embedded some information into the value of pi, if I remember correctly, which would take us back to the Big Bang…
At some point during the 1980s, a rogue virus wiped out all dogs and cats of the planet; monkeys and apes replaced them as the pets of choice.
1994 was the year the sapient chimpanzee Caesar led a revolt against humanity by their ape pets and slaves – the pivotal event that led to Earth becoming known as the Planet Of The Apes. Within a few years, a nuclear war had occurred, and all the apes had miraculously learned to talk…
(source: Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes, 1972)
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