There'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.
I 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.
Fallout, or its predecessor Wasteland, was probably inspired in part by works like Canticle for Liebowitz, which were just normal (dystopian) futurism at the time.
I agree that Fallout was retro-futurism; I'd forgotten there was a term for it.
As for Pattern Recognition, the postmodern label isn't mine. It's a massively overloaded term, certainly, and I know some writers cut off the "postmodern novel" era around 1990. But the sort of academics who include Paul Auster and David Eggers wrote about it as a postmodern work in postmodern theory journals. It's definitely not a clean example of "future in the past", since it could easily have been very-near-future - I suppose I mostly included it for the tone of an unanchored present, rather than the actual chronology.
> 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.
I 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.
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.
That’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.
"all those space battles would be pretty boring without humans to run the ships."
I seem to remember that in one of the Culture novels they mention that it's about 10,000 years since anyone had the title "Captain" on one of their ships - and even then it wasn't a serious role.
"I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side."
Letting a human command a Culture warship would be like letting a bacteria command the USS Nimitz.
During a fight Killing Time destroys two other starships and thinks afterwards "Entire engagement duration: eleven microseconds".
I seem to recall that one of the later novels -- maybe Surface Detail or Hydrogen Sonata -- had an even more lopsided victory by one of the Culture's latest warships over a battle fleet crewed by foolish biologicals who wouldn't let their own AIs operate autonomously.
That may be 'Look To Winward', where a war retired Mind is having a lot of philosophical conversations with the local human music composer. Actually this Mind is not actually captaining a moving ship, he's retired into nursing a static orbital and its organic living forms :)
Many SF novels had self-driving cabs. Don't remember specific names, but I think Heinlein has a few. Strugacky Brothers had bio-mechanical semi-intelligent transportation devices.
I think a lot of people miss something important. Anyone who can imagine an autonomous robot can imagine a self-driving car (or a car driven by a robot). The reason they aren't more prevalent is because people in the past had very different ideas about what is and isn't worth automating. Today, most people think a walking, talking humanoid robot would be a bad idea. They were everywhere in 60s SF.
I was very frustrated watching the first of the newest Star Trek movies when Checkov runs to grab control of the teleporter to catch the two falling crew members plummeting towards the planet surface: as though in the age when it’s possible to decompose matter and retransmit it to some other location they do not have computers fast enough and accurate enough to calculate a trajectory of objects falling at terminal velocity. Seems exactly like the sort of the thing a computer should handle not a human.
I don't think it's ridiculous. Planes can fly themselves now, but when people are aboard, we still have a person in charge of the plane.
It's partly a cultural thing--we trust people to have a conservative sense of self-preservation and obligation to the "souls aboard" that we know computers lack.
And, we know that despite the computer's superior speed of mathematical computation, it remains a somewhat inflexible "thinker" that only does what it is told to do by a human. We have no way to rigorously account for all possible scenarios the plane might face, the we can rigorously account for the performance of the materials and fuel of the airplane.
Airliners cannot fly themselves, unless you accept a narrow definition of “fly”. Sure, they can fly an approach. Try can’t make a go/no-go decision, accept and follow a take-off clearance, pick a cruising altitude, follow speed restrictions, do a VFR approach, and park themselves.
I always got the sense that the reason there aren't computers in Dune was because they can't be coerced in the same way humans could be, and as such would not make an interesting addition to the story he was trying to tell.
At the time people were used to constantly increasing access to energy so in their minds we would have almost infinite energy in the future which would make flying cars feasible. However most people living today in the west have never experienced increasing access to energy so a future with abundant energy seems much further off than it did 50 years ago.
Notably, plenty of novels went on and on about transportation in the future: multiple moving sidewalks at different speeds, and all that jazz. But apparently this gets too drawn out and boring when translated to the screen, so the topic gets less attention in movies.
Try 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.
Weeelllll... 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":)
Several 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.
Optimism 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).
Imperial 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.
Sure, 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.
1966 pre-dates the full and equal legalisation of contraception in the US: 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.
> 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.
Escape 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.
I'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?
In 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.
To be fair, Rogue One is a direct prequel to A New Hope, which was filmed in the 70s, so it has to maintain that aesthetic and has to contain the same anachronisms like "data tapes."
All of the Star Wars prequels (and the Star Trek series set before TOS) have the same problem, in that they have to present a "futuristic" universe that's acceptably so to modern audiences, yet maintain a sense of visual continuity as antecedents to shows or movies whose look was set in stone decades ago.
Also, you have to consider that Rogue One is an action movie, it's grand, swashbuckling Buck Rogers style space opera. You can't start with a thrilling orbital dogfight, then have close quarters urban combat, then... sitting at a terminal making database queries or something. It might be more realistic but it would also ruin the tone and pacing of the film.
Star 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.
Indeed, computers in that universe seem to be both extremely mature and immature. Mature enough for sentient, highly specialized (and general) AI surpassing human ability. But so immature that the "targeting computer" for a state-of-the-art fighter is a crappy norton bombsight-esque augmented reality screen. Advanced enough to store/sort/route navigational data for any 2 points in the galaxy. But so underdeveloped that architectural blueprints are best stored and moved around on physical media. Advanced enough to automate intergalactic cargo/freight/etc. But so underdeveloped that humans need to operate WW2-style plexigalss ball turrets in order to target/shoot down TIE fighters.
It's what happens when you lock retro-futurism into the franchise's canon.
It'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.
I 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.
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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.
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.
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.
As for Pattern Recognition, the postmodern label isn't mine. It's a massively overloaded term, certainly, and I know some writers cut off the "postmodern novel" era around 1990. But the sort of academics who include Paul Auster and David Eggers wrote about it as a postmodern work in postmodern theory journals. It's definitely not a clean example of "future in the past", since it could easily have been very-near-future - I suppose I mostly included it for the tone of an unanchored present, rather than the actual chronology.
The Gernsback Continuum is available online:
http://writing2.richmond.edu/jessid/eng216/gernsback.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20070217183337/http://www.americ...
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.
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.
I seem to remember that in one of the Culture novels they mention that it's about 10,000 years since anyone had the title "Captain" on one of their ships - and even then it wasn't a serious role.
"I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side."
Letting a human command a Culture warship would be like letting a bacteria command the USS Nimitz.
During a fight Killing Time destroys two other starships and thinks afterwards "Entire engagement duration: eleven microseconds".
I seem to recall that one of the later novels -- maybe Surface Detail or Hydrogen Sonata -- had an even more lopsided victory by one of the Culture's latest warships over a battle fleet crewed by foolish biologicals who wouldn't let their own AIs operate autonomously.
I think a lot of people miss something important. Anyone who can imagine an autonomous robot can imagine a self-driving car (or a car driven by a robot). The reason they aren't more prevalent is because people in the past had very different ideas about what is and isn't worth automating. Today, most people think a walking, talking humanoid robot would be a bad idea. They were everywhere in 60s SF.
Not that I'd recommend it as a novel.
Also this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XlXXoq7N4UQ
It's partly a cultural thing--we trust people to have a conservative sense of self-preservation and obligation to the "souls aboard" that we know computers lack.
And, we know that despite the computer's superior speed of mathematical computation, it remains a somewhat inflexible "thinker" that only does what it is told to do by a human. We have no way to rigorously account for all possible scenarios the plane might face, the we can rigorously account for the performance of the materials and fuel of the airplane.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#/m...
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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.
Blade Runner has always got the prediction closest, in my opinion. The future is ruled by corporations.
Arguably Orwell knew this.
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":)
Also, Men Like Gods by H.G. Wells is about an essentially perfect utopia.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
All of the Star Wars prequels (and the Star Trek series set before TOS) have the same problem, in that they have to present a "futuristic" universe that's acceptably so to modern audiences, yet maintain a sense of visual continuity as antecedents to shows or movies whose look was set in stone decades ago.
Also, you have to consider that Rogue One is an action movie, it's grand, swashbuckling Buck Rogers style space opera. You can't start with a thrilling orbital dogfight, then have close quarters urban combat, then... sitting at a terminal making database queries or something. It might be more realistic but it would also ruin the tone and pacing of the film.
It's what happens when you lock retro-futurism into the franchise's canon.
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.
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.