Just a thought to share with my fellow book worms. Movie enthusiasts also welcome.
There are literally hundred of thousandths books written (and movies made) where everything happens in near future. But we are now well past that near future. Think classic dystopian style works like Lord of the flies or 1984.
How would you percept and even compare some renown literary work or movie which was intended to be seen as short lived fiction in near future which we live in (and it is obviously not it) to otherwise alternate reality (Sci-fi) which was designed as is/was?
Reason for this topic. Read bunch of “scifi classic” near future books from 60-90’s this year. They are all good, but they mostly don’t make sense, if I do not switch to AltHis mode.
One of the reasons I love watching 1980s/90s science fiction (stuff like Total Recall) - it’s obviously supposed to be the future (laser guns, cyborgs, cities on other planets, etc) but then they go over to a computer monitor and the best their graphics can do is something from the time of DOS.
Science fiction set in the near future was rarely about the near future. It was generally the author’s way of commenting on the present by extrapolating current conditions.
There is a book called Warday that at the time was science fiction but now reads as Alternate history if the US and the Soviets fought a limited nuclear war in the 1990s.
Norman Spinrad’s Russian Spring has the Soviet Union as the big superpower in the future. Now, plenty of books have examples of that, except that Russian Spring came out a month or two after the Soviet Union fell apart.
Asimov also had a story postulating that we could never climb Mt. Everest that came out six months after Everest had been climbed.
It’s even better when you watch stuff made today that’s supposed to be set in those universes. Like the Clone Wars cartoon, where they sometimes have to use their sophisticated, cutting edge computer animation to render something like this.
Never occurred to anyone that everyone would have a little gadget that accessed a worldwide data feed, told the time, took pictures AND videos, and made phone calls.
And you still won’t see them in movies because people who stare at their phones are boring.
One of the saddest special effects of all time is the video screen on Regula One in Wrath of Khan that just has a rectangular piece of opaque material covering up what it obviously a regular old CRT monitor, with a hole in it through which we see Uhura’s face trying to get someone on board to respond.
Interestingly, this is one of the few things 2001 got right, even if behind-the-scenes the flat screens were back-projected. Of course, 2010 went right ahead and un-did getting it right.
And in 2012, we did not send an international crew of astronauts to Jupiter in order to find out what happened to the last crew of astronauts we sent to Jupiter. The U.S. didn’t go to war with Russia that year, and Jupiter did not turn into a second sun.
Alternately, the Earth wasn’t racked by Armageddon level earthquakes and no giant ark was created to save the 1% richest folks in the world…and John Cusack and his family.
