Theme: Future Scenarios

The future concerns any setting at a point ahead of us now in time. Ever since its beginnings, science-fiction has made great efforts at depicting how society may change and evolve, how scientific progresses may transform the world, or alternately Dystopias where the future may become a nightmare.

The first major depictions of the future came in the industrial dystopia of Metropolis (1927) and the H.G. Wells scripted Things to Come (1936) that saw the future transformed by science into a world of clean white antiseptic lines where people wore Grecian robes.

By the 1950s, visions of the future headed to the stars, which saw the journey conducted by no-nonsense engineers in boiler suits. This led to the utopianism of Star Trek (1966-9), which saw diverse crews belonging to a galactic federation carrying a message of democracy to other worlds.

The 1960s also brought a series of dystopian visions with Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and other works, which usually extrapolated some undesirable social trend of the day to a nightmare extreme and saw it run by an autocratic government. By the time of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1971), the antiseptic white vision of the future was one that saw humanity being strangled and reduced to an imperfection as our machinery and systems turned against us.

The 1950s brought the first depictions of the Post-Holocaust future, where civilisation had been destroyed (usually by nuclear war). By the 1980s, this had become a world where crazies roamed the wastelands in dune buggies and affected a ragged leather chic. Depictions of the 2000s onwards became more grim and added environmental catastrophe scenarios to the mix.

The 1980s also brought Cyberpunk, a future that was a direct outthrust of today, filled with bustling texture, advertising and extrapolations of technology into A.I. and Virtual Reality. Adjacent to this is the dark future where cyborgs and androids fight in a rundown world teetering on or fully collapsed.

There are other works that take place in Near Future Settings where little of the present-day has changed except perhaps for one technological innovation or trend. Other depictions include futures where humanity has expanded out into the solar system and colonised other worlds or the entire galaxy. Other works are set in Far Future Settings where civilisation is forgotten and humanity has evolved or devolved.