The Near Future is Never Clear

"Who's James Franco?"

Science fiction is full of stories about the future. Every technological achievement is a possibility given enough time. But there is a problem with depicting the future. What happens when the time portrayed in the story finally comes around? Time is constantly moving and while a story may be depicting a story in the distant future, that distant future eventually becomes the recent past. There comes a point when all science fiction will become dated.

"Remind me to invest in Apple."

Now there is a reason why most writers do not set their stories in the far distant future. The simple reason is that such a world is hard to imagine. Getting the timeline as close as possible to the present guarantees that the characters being written are not all that different from people living in the now. Thus the entire society depicted is not far removed from our own. When one looks at a show like Star Trek, you can see that the world depicted is vastly different than present society. As it should be since it is several centuries removed from the present. It will be many, many years until Star Trek is outdated.

"HAL is code for IBM."

But several science fiction properties have already been debunked with their portrayal of the future. 2001 has come and gone and yet we do not have the level of space travel as portrayed in the film of the same name. No space odysseys for us just yet. Now at the time of the film’s release, 2001 was a good ways off. 1968 was a buzz with thoughts about space travel and it was not out of the realm of possibility to imagine such an event as space travel becoming commonplace, like air travel is now. But in all honesty this deadline was not imposed upon the film because of any prediction of the future, but because 2001 sounds like a cool sci-fi type year that would be an excellent title for a book/film.

"Just wipe away Gigli and Jersey Girl"

A better example of a miss prediction of the future is the movie Paycheck. This 2003 film release only jumped four years ahead into the future. While their certainly is precedent for major technological advances occurring in only a four year period. However this film depicted holographic computer screens and computers capable of depicting the future, not to mention the rather simple and recurring erasing of large chunks of a person’s memory. Sadly none of these things came to pass in 2007. In fact now in 2013 we still have trouble perfecting the 3D TV so perhaps this film should have given itself several more years before it became completely outdated.

"Run! Before the Evangelion fans get here!"

For some reason a lot of writers think 2015 will be a year where a lot of technological advances will happen. According to several films (The Sixth Day and the Island) we will have perfected human cloning, created cyborgs (Robocop) and we will also get flying cars (Back to the Future II). Of course according to Transformers: The Animated Movie, we got hover boards ten years sooner, aka eight years ago. 2050 should see even more technological achievements with the ability to predict violent crime (Minority Report), time travel (Looper), Giant Monster Killing Robobts (Pacific Rim), and interstellar space travel (Lost in Space, the movie). Of course other films have depicted us getting those technologies much sooner or much later.

In truth, science fiction is where we dream of a better world. Or at the very least, a world more advanced than we are currently. A world where we have solved scientific questions that plague us today and the bulk of the human race is just a little bit smarter than it is now. So while many of these predictions about the future turned out to be completely wrong, that should not stop anyone from envisioning what the world will one day be like.