Sci-Fi Set in the 2020’s Predicted a Dim Decade for Humanity

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From BookBub:

Science fiction has always had a complicated relationship with the future; however, sci-fi is all about looking forward to the wondrous things that mankind will achieve — Flying cars! Personal jetpacks! Venusian vacations! After all, a bright and happy future is kind of…boring. Even when you imagine a post-scarcity future like the one in Star Trek, you have to throw in a bit of nuclear holocaust, and the Neutral Zone to spice things up.

Now that we’re firmly entrenched in the 21st century (which for a long time was shorthand for ‛the future’ in sci-fi), it’s fascinating to look at all the stories set in this particular decade to see how past SF masters thought things were going to go. One thing is abundantly clear: No matter how bad you think the decade is going to be, sci-fi writers think the 2020s are going to be worse.

. . . .

The horrifying, dystopian, and extinction-level scenarios imagined in sci-fi set in the 2020s are impressive. There’s the quiet desperation depicted in The Children of Men—the critically-acclaimed, influential, and unexpected sci-fi novel from master crime writer P.D. James—which imagined the last human children being born in 1995, leading to a world swamped by apathy and suicide in 2021. On the other end of the spectrum, you have a 2020 like the one in the film Reign of Fire, where we’re all battling literal dragons in the ashen remnants of society.

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In-between, you have just about every kind of misery. In Stephen King’s prescient novel The Running Man, 2025 finds the United States on the brink of economic collapse, with desperate citizens driven to appear on deadly reality-TV shows. (Although maybe it doesn’t matter since Ray Bradbury’s classic short story There Will Come Soft Rains tells us that by 2026, the world will be a nuclear blast zone anyway.) The Running Man is one of King’s most underrated novels, weaving themes of economic inequality decades before the issue was mainstream.

. . . .

[A]pocalypse and dystopia are just more fun. What would you rather be doing, flying around the world with a jetpack because everyone is rich and healthy? Or hunting down replicants in a Blade Runner version of Los Angeles that resembles… well, today’s actual Los Angeles if we’re being honest? Here’s another take: Which is more interesting, going to your job every day in a stable if imperfect society? Or firing up the artillery and battling real, actual dragons? The latter, obviously, which is why sci-fi always goes to the dragons, the evil AIs, and violently sociopathic clones, usually accompanied by a society that’s so far gone that no one bothers with things like jobs anymore.

Link to the rest at BookBub

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4 thoughts on “Sci-Fi Set in the 2020’s Predicted a Dim Decade for Humanity”

  1. Most near-term (as in a century or so) SF is actually written from the “if this goes on…” model. The “this” that is “going on” is, at least in terms of how much attention it receives, is all to frequently bad.

    The “eponymous” story (“If This Goes On…” by Robert Heinlein) is the perfect example. When written, there was rapidly increasing influence over politics from religious demagogues – so it was natural to extrapolate that one of them would manage to take control of the country and establish a rigid theocracy.

    Nuclear war, biowar, right-wing/left-wing/whatever-ideology-the-writer-thinks-is-bad, etc.

    However – most readers will tolerate a completely dystopic short work. Completely dystopic longer works, except for a very few, do not do well on the market. Longer works, like the RAH work, usually need an opposition to the dystopia to be of interest to the majority of the market.

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