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List of stories set in a future now past
- apo 8y agoFunny how you can be right about future facts (world population) but wrong about the consequences. Make Room! Make Room! [1966] The world is overpopulated at 7 billion people, with 35 million people in New York City alone. The inspiration for the film Soylent Green (1973). Maybe not surprising, but worth noting anyway just how pessimistic these stories are.
- brlewis 8y agoTry getting a publisher to accept a book about a future world that's somewhat cleaner and more convenient than today. I can't wait for the movie version.
- NikolaNovak 8y agoWeeelllll... isn't that what the Culture series by Iain Banks was about - a vision of post-scarcity utopian future? As for movie version, I'd wager Star Trek, at least up to Discovery, was similarly about a vision of a better society (to the point that, as I discussed with few of my friends and colleagues, for a lot of us it has subconsciously shaped our political thinking: "Is this law / action on the path to Star Trek future, or not":)
- alexgmcm 8y agoYeah - but now write a movie about a future that's more or less the same except stuff is slightly better and my phone has a nicer camera. Slow, gradual improvement isn't as exciting as disaster and apocalypse.
- ianai 8y agoLove utopian stories. But I think they’re much more difficult to write since they’re fewer, or something. Modern sci-fi is downright jaded. They don’t bother to introduce technology half the time. It’s jusr taken as a given that the guns shoot colored fireballs or death rays. All transportation just floats around, etc. and people mostly scrap by on whatever they can find and die often.
- krapp 8y agoI think they're more difficult to write because they're more difficult to imagine, plausibly. I can imagine a future with energy weapons and flying cars, but one in which corporations and governments don't leverage technology to oppress and enslave the masses, where the rich don't get richer and the poor don't die like dogs, just seems like propaganda.
- tomatotomato37 8y agoThe thing is that you can have that without making it such an active point. One of the things I really like about Snow Crash is that while overall it's an anarcho-capitalistic dystopia where criminal organizations are incorporated, no one's actively wingeing about it, its just a setting to the main plot.
- ianai 8y agoStar Trek serialized it (seemingly) easily enough. They essentially got a new universe of problems to explore every episode with the context of the Federations technology and administration.
- rsynnott 8y agoStar Trek's society never made much _sense_, though. If you exclude all the utopian speeches given by Picard, and just look at the interaction of the Federation and Starfleet, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a military dictatorship. (Pet theory; the Federation is a Soviet-ish military command economy. The episodes we see are in-universe propaganda produced by the state. That's why everyone is so heroic, and why all of the rival civilisations are mostly one-dimensional stereotypes.) I think Banks' Culture is a better example of a utopia played straight, but most of the action in those novels takes place largely outside the Culture.
- krapp 8y ago>That's why everyone is so heroic, and why all of the rival civilisations are mostly one-dimensional stereotypes. That is literally what they are, they're intended to act as mirrors to various aspects of humanity, or embody singular aspects of the plot of the week.
- rsynnott 8y agoThe Culture series are mostly about the Culture rubbing up against far less utopian societies, though; a pure story about a utopia would be boring.
- andygates 8y agoIt would probably be a long party and psychodrama. Intensely interesting to the participants, but we're not them.
- Apocryphon 8y agoSounds like most episodes of Black Mirror. And they certainly offer cleaner and more convenient futures, just the opposite of utopian in concept and in tone.
- vidarh 8y agoOne of the Culture novels do include a lengthy descriptions of a party that had lasted a ridiculously long time. Hydrogen Sonata possibly... There are quite a few descriptions of utopian societies partying in sci fi, but usually as an excuse to make one group or another stand out as gloriously debauched to set up the inevitable downturn when someone crashes the party or some character or other at the party is forced to face real life. But they can be interesting stories in their own right - just probably not easy to expand to novel length.
- perl4ever 8y ago"The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation, and still no one shows any signs of leaving. Somebody did once look at his watch, but that was eleven years ago, and there has been no follow-up. The mess is extraordinary, and has to be seen to be believed, but if you don't have any particular need to believe it, then don't go and look, because you won't enjoy it. There have recently been some bangs and flashes up in the clouds, and there is one theory that this is a battle being fought between the fleets of several rival carpet-cleaning companies who are hovering over the thing like vultures, but you shouldn't believe anything you hear at parties, and particularly not anything you hear at this one. One of the problems, and it's one which is obviously going to get worse, is that all the people at the party are either the children or the grandchildren or the great-grandchildren of the people who wouldn't leave in the first place, and because of all the business about selective breeding and regressive genes and so on, it means that all the people now at the party are either absolutely fanatical partygoers, or gibbering idiots, or, more and more frequently, both."
- brlewis 8y agoI haven't kept up with sci fi for a long time so I had to google Culture Series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture_(series)#Books_in_the_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture_(series)#Books_in_... Sounds like the utopian culture of the protagonists is surrounded by plenty of non-utopian drama. Star Trek - a future where I might die because I chose to put on a red shirt in the morning. ;-)
- scotty79 8y agoRead Iain M. Banks. It might be the best SF I've ever read. And I read a lot of SF.
- chimprich 8y agoI agree, but the downside is that you'll be spoilt for most of the rest of the genre, because little else measures up. Perhaps read everything else first. Amazon Prime currently has an adaptation of Consider Phlebas in the pipeline, something I have very mixed feelings about.
- rsynnott 8y agoNot sure why they went for that one, really; even as a novel it's kind of messy and confusing, and I struggle to imagine how an adaptation will work. Player of Games would have been a much more obvious choice.
- NikolaNovak 8y agoI'm torn; it's my least favourite of Culture novels, and I almost consider it an early trial, very different in spirit and nature than the rest; but I can see how it'd be an obvious choice for a movie/series: it has the most action/adventure feel and a simple linear storyline (even if you account for the "twist" of who the good guys / bad guys are). There's a single protagonist, we focus largely on him, and he goes out and has adventures in space. Whereas something like Excession - that can never ever be a movie, really...:-/
- User23 8y agoThere's another view which is that the Culture Minds keep humans around as pets. For those who hold that view, the Culture is actually a dystopia.
- ianai 8y agoSure, but I’ve still seen enough dystopian films/shows. Bird box and skyline are basically the same film, at the start/premise. Don’t look or you’ll die.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mrec 8y agoKim Stanley Robinson's Pacific Edge (the last in his Orange County trilogy) springs to mind.
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoOptimism may be passe in TV and film right now, but there's plenty of those in written sci-fi. Off the top of my head, I recently read John Scalzi's Interdependency series (the two books of it that are out, anyway).
- rsynnott 8y agoThose are about the collapse of civilisation, and it's a pretty nasty civilisation; I'm not sure how optimistic they are.
- burkaman 8y agoImperial Earth by Arthur C. Clarke takes place in a generally better future where the solar system has been colonized. I found it incredibly boring, which is maybe your point. Also, Men Like Gods by H.G. Wells is about an essentially perfect utopia.
- rsynnott 8y agoAnother example would be Alastair Reynolds' Poseidon's Children series; unlike the rest of his novels, which are generally extremely grim, it takes place in a sort of flawed utopia. A lot of people dislike it for this reason.
- larkeith 8y agoSeveral books and quite a few short stories by Arthur C Clarke are more or less optimistic about the future - definitely not utopian, but better than today.
- KnightOfWords 8y ago> Maybe not surprising, but worth noting anyway just how pessimistic these stories are. That remains to be seen I'm afraid, the long-term carrying capacity of the planet is unknown. The green revolution has allowed us to feed 7 billion+ people but is powered by fossil fuels. The costs are accelerated climate change, soil degradation and aquifer depletion. Feeding the current population for a few decades is one thing, doing so for centuries or millennia quite another.
- JohnJamesRambo 8y agoWho knew that food wouldn’t be the thing running out, but our free will and privacy? Facebook is made of peeeople! Blade Runner has always got the prediction closest, in my opinion. The future is ruled by corporations.
- bproven 8y agosame in death race 2000! :)
- ghaff 8y agoAlso the original Rollerball.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago>Who knew that food wouldn’t be the thing running out, but our free will and privacy Arguably Orwell knew this.
- JohnJamesRambo 8y agoYep he nailed many things so well.
- krapp 8y ago> Funny how you can be right about future facts (world population) but wrong about the consequences. Like a future with interplanetary colonies and sentient robots but no personal computers and definitely no internet. Or an internet, but it's virtual reality, and human consciousness is stored on data tapes.
- Tor3 8y agoAs a boy I read Asimov's "I, Robot" books, and I remember even back then I thought it strange that the robot's programming was stored on paper tape..
- kumarharsh 8y agoI think most of them later had positronic brains, especially in the short stories and Foundation saga.
- Tor3 8y agoAs I recall they all had positronic brains from the beginning, but the factory that created them used programming on paper tape to feed into whatever created the brain pattern. I vaguely remember a plot that was about some school class visiting the factory and a boy managing to fiddle with the paper tape and change the programming.
- cgriswald 8y agoThis is where the reader’s imagination can fill in the gaps. Paper will survive magnetic fields , heat, and rapid changes in temperature that traditional storage won’t. It’s also cheap and disposable. Maybe one or more of these is an issue when trying to cost-effectively get the initial programming into these things. We conveniently don’t really know how they work.
- tartoran 8y agoIf you think through, analog books are like paper tape. It is possible that future robots will be able to browse analog books and "program" themselves
- pjc50 8y ago1966 pre-dates the full and equal legalisation of contraception in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenstadt_v._Baird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenstadt_v._Baird ; even now reproductive choice is still somewhat in jeopardy and requires constant activism. Tokyo's current population is 37.5 million and the global population is above 7 billion, but the problems are so far not manifesting that badly in the West.
- MR4D 8y agoMakes one wonder how Global Warming will be looked at 50 years from now when they look back at us.
- geordieboozer 8y agoObligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/1491/ https://xkcd.com/1491/
- rootbear 8y agoA friend of mine has been re-reading SF books from his collection once we reach the year in which the book is set. This only works if a specific year is called out, of course. And I'm not sure what he does when a book takes place over a long stretch of time. But it seems like a clever way to revisit older SF novels.
- ajay-d 8y agoMy favorite HN posts are these types of wikipedia articles
- simonh 8y agoIt was quite fun watching the Back To The Future series with my kids, in the same year as the 'Future' of the second film.
- sizzzzlerz 8y agoWhere's my hoverboard??
- graywh 8y agoand one-size-really-does-fit-all clothes
- auggierose 8y agoSoon Bladerunner will be one of those movies. I rewatched it yesterday and was astonished to see that it plays in "November, 2019".
- js2 8y agoI watched Bladerunner again recently (set Nov, 2019, so technically it doesn’t belong on this list just yet). I’ve seen it dozens of times, but for the first time I was struck by the fact that the flying cars in it are still driven/flown by humans. Then I couldn’t think of any stories set in the future with self-driving cars, flying or otherwise. It’s sort of ridiculous at this point to have a human pilot in any futuristic form of transportation, isn’t it? But I guess all those space battles would be pretty boring without humans to run the ships.
- PJDK 8y agoThe Johnny Cabs in Total Recall spring to mind. The Will Smith I, Robot had shifting between auto and self driving modes as a plot point too if I remember rightly. It feels like there are some good stories to tell around them too. I'm personally jealous of the generation of students who will get to wake up with a hangover in a car half way across the country, heading towards somewhere that seemed like a great idea the night before.
- js2 8y agoThat’s right, I had forgotten. Interesting that two PkD-based movies (total recall and minority report pointed out in a sibling comment) have self-driving cars. It’s been too long since I’ve read the stories to remember if that was the case in the books or not.
- Finnucane 8y agoPKD stories and novels frequently feature autonomous or semi-autonomous machines. Joe Chip, in Ubik, is refused service by his apartment door, and later, an autonomous diner service, because he is broke. Also, Dick would use the early '90s as 'the future' pretty frequently.
- vidarh 8y agoIt makes sense given that straddling the line between what is real and what is fake is perhaps the most persistent theme in his works, and this persistent chipping away at the agency of humans by robots by bureaucratic enforcement of rules is also all over his works. Of course then with the regular nagging doubt about who are the humans and who are the robots.
- Bartweiss 8y agoThere's an interesting sub-category here of works where the story's "future" is already behind the author's present - or even the story's present. Tomorrow Town is one of the first sort; written in 2000, about a 1970s attempt to envision the world of 2000. (The visionaries, of course, get it utterly wrong.) Pattern Recognition counts too; it got labeled post-modern because it was felt like SF futurism but was set in the very recent past. Alternate-history carried through the present doesn't all count, but something like Fallout is very consciously about 'realizing' a 1950s view of the future. The Gernsbeck Continuum is the best example I know of the second sort: it's the 1980 we imagined in the 1930s, experienced from the viewpoint of the real 1980. If I stretch the boundaries a bit, Time Out of Joint might count too; a 1950s world, 50s futurism included, recreated by a moon-colonizing future society. This has to be a pretty small list, though, and I'd love more examples.
- gambler 8y agoI believe what Fallout did is typically called retro-futurism. The term "post-modern" is already occupied and has a very different meaning. I don't think Pattern Recognition really counts. Precisely when it was set was mostly irrelevant to the story and the "futurism" of the novel is largely due to the style of writing of William Gibson. It could have been set in the present or near future and nothing would really change.
- brownbat 8y agoFallout, or its predecessor Wasteland, was probably inspired in part by works like Canticle for Liebowitz, which were just normal (dystopian) futurism at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz I don't know what we do when a subgenre starts out as normal futurism, but hangs on to tropes long enough to age into retro futurism.
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoA lot of cyberpunk and space opera is like that, I think, particularly in art. Cyberpunk art is still enamored of '80s neon, fashion, the then-looming fear of Japan Inc., etc. But Fallout is something different, because it embraced '50s retro-futurism from the beginning. (Though it got more obvious in the later games.)
- at-fates-hands 8y agoI read Fahrenheit 451 in high school and then watched the movie. For a junior in high school thinking my whole life was ahead of me, thinking of a future like the one described in the book was kind of unsettling. The fact the book got so many things right in 1953 is pretty eye opening: Predicted regular use of earbud headphones,[2] interactive television, video wall screens, robotic bank tellers,[36] the demise of newspapers and the prevalent use of factoids.[37] Also had the Mechanical Hound[38] and technology for complete blood transfusions.
- keiferski 8y agoEscape from New York is a fun example. At the time the film was made (1981), the idea of New York turning into a lawless prison island by 1997 seemed almost vaguely possible, considering the out-of-control crime rates of the 70s and 80s and the derelict nature of many buildings in the city. Today in 2019, the idea of turning Manhattan into a walled-off prison seems absurd, mostly because the buildings in the city are now worth millions (inflation-adjusted) more than they were in the 80s.
- bbitmaster 8y agoI'm always struck by the giant CRTs in futuristic 80's movies. Blade runner is one example where there are scenes with CRT screens that even look very blurry/dated compared to the screen I'm watching on. Also, this is a recent one, but in Star Wars rogue one, I felt it was odd how they had what looked like an IT nightmare. Seriously, they had to physically fly to the base and deal with a robotic arm connecting hard drives (was it tape drives?). Sure they have humanoid robots that are way beyond any tech today, but their cloud storage was basically current and even old school tech. Why don't they have some tiny crystal that stores unlimited data or DNA storage in a small cylinder or something that you would expect in the future? To be fair it is a "long time ago in a galaxy far away" but still, are we technologically ahead of those death star builders in some way?
- SCAQTony 8y agoStar Wars is a mess for the past has tech more advanced than the future. Blade Runner is still watchable though and never laughable because it seemingly has been placed in an intentional anachronistic SciFi setting: the 1940's hairstyle and dress Rachel wears, a 1950's "Raymond Chandler" slice of life story, a computer that is more "steampunk" than plausible. The films "Brazil", Marie Antoinette", "Titus", Jesus Christ Superstar, adopt that anachronistic style as well.
- Finnucane 8y agoStar Wars: A long time ago in a galaxy far away. Why would you assume their tech progress is the same as ours?
- supermw 8y agoIn Star Wars very few people know how to read, let alone read and write code. This is a consequence of a world where technology advances faster than people are able to understand it, and abstractions build on top of abstractions to the point where everything just seems like magic and nobody needs to concern themselves with how things actually work. In fact, pretty much nobody writes code except droids. The droids are instructed on what to write by a programmer, who is usually some old gray wizard in a hooded robe that speaks about what needs to be created and how it should be done at a very high level, then the droids get to work. Nobody actually understands the code the droids produce, and trying to is mostly a waste of time since you can just tell a droid to rewrite it anyway. As a result, most UI is also built by droids. That's why it's more likely to resemble something like ncurses or maybe vim with a powerline plugin, rather than MacOS or Windows. Because nobody actually understands technology, they tend to develop crude mental models about how things work, and you end up with people doing things the hard way just because they don't know there is any other way to do it. In fact, Star Wars probably wouldn't have even happened if the Empire had better IT security. It's also likely that people in Star Wars don't understand the concept of one technology being more "advanced" than the other, as they have no skills to evaluate that. So you sometimes see better technology in older times and worse tech in newer times. When you look at Star Wars this way, the world actually seems very futuristic, because it is the end result of thousands of generations of people who have come to accept technology as a magical black box where you simply give inputs and get outputs. We can even begin to see this effect in our own world today.
- interfixus 8y agoIt's quite the potboiler, and the underlying disaster mechanism lacks credibility, but I am still fascinated by Charles Pellegrino's novel Dust from 1998, which certainly qualifies for this list, although no exact year is given for the events taking place - but things are understood to be happening in a then near future. I guessed 2005 when I first read it in '99. People carry multi-function pocket computers around, referred to as pads. A massive die-off of insects spells global disaster. At the end, as breathtakingly wrong scenario, but who could have known: Manhattan more or less razed to the ground by a series of nuclear air-bursts, with the WTC Twin Towers nearly the only structures still standing.
- dennisgorelik 8y ago> Back to the Future Part II - Film - 1989 - Year set 2015 > Blade Runner - Film - 1982 - Year set 2019 We are living in the future that seemed to be so far away when I was a teenager ...