
List of stories set in a future now past - benbreen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stories_set_in_a_future_now_past
======
Bartweiss
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.

~~~
gambler
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.

~~~
brownbat
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.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz](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.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
A lot of cyberpunk and space opera is like that, I think, particularly in art.
Cyberpunk art is still enamored of '80s neon, fashion, the then-looming fear
of Japan Inc., etc.

But Fallout is something different, because it embraced '50s retro-futurism
from the beginning. (Though it got more obvious in the later games.)

~~~
Bartweiss
> _A lot of cyberpunk and space opera is like that, I think, particularly in
> art._

This is a really interesting observation, thank you.

If we use _Neuromancer_ a rough start date for cyberpunk, there was nothing
'alternate' about the whole "future of neon and kanji" style. And _Snow Crash_
made an effort to change with the times; the Japanese stylings get justified
as a character thing instead of a cultural one and the psychedelic hacking
gets replaced with a decent anticipation of Second Life. _The Diamond Age_
sticks with the Japanese emphasis, but brings in China and India as major
powers, and updates the sci-fi focus to nanotech.

But somewhere along the line the strength of the aesthetic sort of overwhelms
the attempt at futurism. Gibson came back to the near future and present,
Stephenson went to the past, present, and then the far future. The last really
future-facing cyberpunk novel I can remember reading was _Infoquake_ , and
reviewers kept saying that was "practically cyberpunk" or "had elements of
cyberpunk".

And then at the other end of things, _Altered Carbon_ has humans as an
interstellar species, but still gives us a half-white, half-Japanese
protagonist getting pushed around San Francisco by rich people. _Shadowrun_
goes all the way to magic spells and centaurs, but the videogames retain the
rainy East Asian atmosphere. And _Big Hero 6_ proves it's an aesthetic you can
export completely; it might be a PG superhero movie, but it's about a half-
Japanese kid named Hiro having illegal robot fights in a neon-drenched "San
Fransokyo".

I don't know enough to do the whole rundown, but I suspect you're right about
space opera too: Star Trek and 2001 start off as a modern/futuristic vision,
but endure as this weird near-googie style we recognize as its own entity.

I suppose some aesthetics are way more fun to look at than to actually live in
- we keep them around for art's sake long after they fail to take root.

~~~
aasasd
It seems to me that Stephenson just likes East Asia a lot, I wouldn't be
surprised if it turns out he lived there. E.g. Cryptonomicon has detailed
geography and economics of the region in play, many of the other novels have
events set in there―and in the pretty recent “Reamde” he again spends plenty
of story time in Xiamen and some in Manila, even though the book is set in the
present and there's little cyberpunkish about it.

I'm actually sort of learning from these books about the vibe of the region,
some scraps of relevant history, and the area's economic relations with the
US. Because otherwise it's mostly fantasy land to me.

------
js2
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.

~~~
PJDK
The Johnny Cabs in Total Recall spring to mind.

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.

~~~
js2
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.

~~~
Finnucane
PKD stories and novels frequently feature autonomous or semi-autonomous
machines. Joe Chip, in Ubik, is refused service by his apartment door, and
later, an autonomous diner service, because he is broke. Also, Dick would use
the early '90s as 'the future' pretty frequently.

~~~
vidarh
It makes sense given that straddling the line between what is real and what is
fake is perhaps _the_ most persistent theme in his works, and this persistent
chipping away at the agency of humans by robots by bureaucratic enforcement of
rules is also all over his works. Of course then with the regular nagging
doubt about who are the humans and who are the robots.

------
apo
Funny how you can be right about future facts (world population) but wrong
about the consequences.

 _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.

~~~
brlewis
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.

~~~
NikolaNovak
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":)

~~~
ianai
Love utopian stories. But I think they’re much more difficult to write since
they’re fewer, or something.

Modern sci-fi is downright jaded. They don’t bother to introduce technology
half the time. It’s jusr taken as a given that the guns shoot colored
fireballs or death rays. All transportation just floats around, etc. and
people mostly scrap by on whatever they can find and die often.

~~~
krapp
I think they're more difficult to write because they're more difficult to
imagine, plausibly.

I can imagine a future with energy weapons and flying cars, but one in which
corporations and governments don't leverage technology to oppress and enslave
the masses, where the rich don't get richer and the poor don't die like dogs,
just seems like propaganda.

~~~
ianai
Star Trek serialized it (seemingly) easily enough. They essentially got a new
universe of problems to explore every episode with the context of the
Federations technology and administration.

~~~
rsynnott
Star Trek's society never made much _sense_, though. If you exclude all the
utopian speeches given by Picard, and just look at the interaction of the
Federation and Starfleet, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a military
dictatorship.

(Pet theory; the Federation is a Soviet-ish military command economy. The
episodes we see are in-universe propaganda produced by the state. That's why
everyone is so heroic, and why all of the rival civilisations are mostly one-
dimensional stereotypes.)

I think Banks' Culture is a better example of a utopia played straight, but
most of the action in those novels takes place largely outside the Culture.

~~~
krapp
>That's why everyone is so heroic, and why all of the rival civilisations are
mostly one-dimensional stereotypes.

That is literally what they are, they're intended to act as mirrors to various
aspects of humanity, or embody singular aspects of the plot of the week.

~~~
labster
Shaka, when the walls fell.

~~~
krapp
Don't get me started on Darmok. I don't understand why that episode is so
praised, it makes no sense.

How... _HOW_ do you have a technological, much less warp capable, civilization
if you only speak in metaphor and allegory?

How do engineers get anything done? Do they write white papers in metaphors?
Do the captains of their ships issue orders in metaphors?

Languages _don 't work like that._ They literally _can 't_ work like that.

It literally makes me... mildly annoyed.

~~~
labster
The media, when Kanye tweeted.

~~~
ianai
It’s also not like we’re told the federation has had complete access to
everything about the society. There could be more traditional stories shared
with their children as a basis for the language, but unshared with the
federation.

All language lives within a culture, and words only convey meaning through a
mutually shared understanding. They’ve made allegories first class parts of
language, the equivalent to our individual words.

------
keiferski
_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.

------
bbitmaster
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?

~~~
supermw
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.

~~~
Cyph0n
I think your first paragraph is an apt description of our world, starting from
the early 20th century and onwards.

~~~
supermw
Especially the 21st century and onwards.

~~~
Cyph0n
I'm not only talking about technology, but also critical infrastructure and
transportation, both of which had breakthroughs in the 20th century with the
development of cars and planes, as well as the development of AC transmission
and the electric grid.

------
interfixus
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.

------
at-fates-hands
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._

------
auggierose
Soon Bladerunner will be one of those movies. I rewatched it yesterday and was
astonished to see that it plays in "November, 2019".

------
simonh
It was quite fun watching the Back To The Future series with my kids, in the
same year as the 'Future' of the second film.

~~~
sizzzzlerz
Where's my hoverboard??

~~~
graywh
and one-size-really-does-fit-all clothes

------
rootbear
A friend of mine has been re-reading SF books from his collection once we
reach the year in which the book is set. This only works if a specific year is
called out, of course. And I'm not sure what he does when a book takes place
over a long stretch of time. But it seems like a clever way to revisit older
SF novels.

------
dennisgorelik
> Back to the Future Part II - Film - 1989 - Year set 2015

> Blade Runner - Film - 1982 - Year set 2019

We are living in the future that seemed to be so far away when I was a
teenager ...

------
ajay-d
My favorite HN posts are these types of wikipedia articles

------
geordieboozer
Obligatory xkcd [https://xkcd.com/1491/](https://xkcd.com/1491/)

