Chronological Obsolescence

 

You can’t get much more futuristic dystopian than the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. It practically invented the subgenre of dystopian science fiction.   It was written in the 1940’s when the year 1984 seemed like a long way off.  I was thinking about it the other day and realizing that the year 1984 was 37 years ago. A good chunk of the population of the world wasn’t even born yet when this “futuristic” novel was set. How are we supposed to feel about a book or a film that is set in a future that has already passed? Nineteen Eighty-Four is not alone in this quandary.  Back to the Future II (the one that is really set in the future) is set in 2015. The novel Make Room, Make Room by Harry Harrison which became the movie Soylent Green, was set in 1999. The film Blade Runner is set in 2019. Ray Bradbury’s the Martian Chronicles (in the original printing) was set over a range of years from 1999 to 2026. At least Aldous Huxley set his Brave New World far enough in the future (2540 AD) so as not to have to worry about this problem for a long time.                               

And let’s not forget 2001: A Space Odyssey. That movie, even though it did not do terribly well at the box office when it first came out, became an icon and is recognized as one of the great films of the 20^th Century. Kids like me in 1968, looked at the beautiful, fantastical future of 2001 and knew that we would probably see that year in our lifetimes. We wondered what our lives would be like. That we would have moon bases and space stations by then, seemed a sure bet. After all the movie came out just one year before Apollo 11 landed on the moon. No one could have imagined that after a few trips, we would abandon the moon altogether. But when we actually got to the year 2001, we didn’t think too much about the movie. By then we had forgotten all those visions of what the year 2001 would be like.

Had I been alive in the 1940’s when Nineteen Eighty-Four was written, I might have wondered about the future 1984. Would it be a technological wonderland or a dystopian nightmare? I guess that would have depended on if you were an optimist or a pessimist. As it was, I did not read Nineteen Eighty-Four until the year 1984. They came out with a new edition that year (of course they did). The world described in the novel was quite different from the world I lived, in so it was easy to just pass it off as a work of fiction and appreciate it as such. And yet, Nineteen Eighty-Four was written as a warning and some of the things we were being warned about have come to pass. Surveillance is now everywhere at least in cities. From traffic cameras to security cameras, big Brother is watching. Those cameras may not have been there in 1984, but they are there now, with more coming on line every day. In my country, America has not become a totalitarian dictatorship as the country shown in the novel, yet we are increasingly becoming a country of the haves and have-nots. 1% of the population own more wealth than the bottom 90%. That sounds like a recipe for a dystopian world.

When you are travelling through time, the time you are at, is always the time you are at. Dreams of the future and memories of the past are less important than the problems of the day.  So, we pass these landmarks taking little notice. We appreciate the fiction as fiction, and don’t worry about the fact that we don’t actually have antigravity hoverboards to zip around on. It is good not to take the future predictions too literally. But the warnings . . . those we should pay attention to.

(My science fiction novel Star Liner (set in the very distant undefined future), is now available in paperback or as an e-book through Amazon and other online sources).

Star Liner