Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon.
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Yet again it is a Tuesday and, yet again, free speech has broken out.
But how will that freedom of speech be used?
Only the readers of this blog can decide - because we've reached the latest installment of the feature in which the first person to comment gets to decide the topic of the day.
It may be sport, art, films, books, cooks, nooks, rocks, music, mucous, fairy tales, fairy lights, Fairy Liquid, fairy cakes, Eccles cakes, myth, moths, maths, magic, murder, mystery, mayhem, May Day, Christmas Day, sofas, sodas, sausages, eggs, whisky, broth, Bath, Garth Marenghi, Garth Brooks, Garth Crooks, Bruno Brookes, Bruno Mars, Mars Bars, wine bars, flip-flops, flim-flam, flapjacks, see-saws, flowers, flours, bread bins, bin bags, body bags, doggy bags, bean bags, cola, pancakes, pizzas, sci-fi, Wi-Fi, Hi-Fi, horror, sewage, saunas, suet, Silurians, Sontarans, sins, suns, sans or sandcastles.
Then again, it might not be.
Let us see what develops...
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35 comments:
Charlie was going to challenge this venerable group to come up with variations on the name Bananabreath Cucumberpatch, but that was just recently covered. Sigh...
I'm not quite sure how to frame the question, but what about science-fiction views of the future from ages ago?
You know, seeing as we're in 2022, the year of Soylent Green.
What seems quaint about, 20th century predictions of the world that was coming in the 21st, and what seems prescient? What hasn't happened, thats disappointing? Etc etc...
-sean
Don't worry Charlie, I just found this -
https://benedictcumberbatchgenerator.tumblr.com
You're welcome.
-sean
SEAN - Great question (and thanks for that name tumbler!)
Well... If a Marvel comic can count as science fiction...
I don't see Marvel's Killraven, from Amazing Adventures, running around in thigh-high boots whilst being chased by Martian thingies taking over our planet. I think that invasion started in 2021?
I'm just wondering -- you guys have an opinion, regarding that DC Maxi Series "Camelot 3000"..other than several months between the last few issues?
Benedict Cucumberpatch made a plausible onscreen Dr. Strange. Though I'll wait to see MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS when it's on Disney+, which a barmaid gave me access to.
While being a Sam Raimi (Evil Dead, Spidey films, etc), their claim of it being a "horror" film leaves me in disbelief.
Other MCU films I've viewed after Avengers Endgame have left me with an dismayed outlook with the franchise going forward. BLACK WIDOW was a PG KILL BILL, SHANG-CHI was only good as as martial arts film if you disassociate it from Marvel, and I put 20 minutes into the ETERNALS till clipping off and grumbling "Errr..."
Charlie-
You gotta admit, Benedict Cumberbatch did a better Strange than the guy in that CBS tv pilot I cut you. Hope you watched it. Great fun.
Sean-
Soylet Green is one of my favorite dystopian future sci-fi films. Who knows what, or who, gets grinded up in our processed food. Government inspection? Here in the colonies we have a saying, "Money talks, and bullsh*t walks." Bet there's a few Sweeny Todd meat product producers out there.
I still enjoy Spam, though.
If you'd asked somebody in 1950 to describe life in 2022 they'd probably have mentioned a lunar base or a Martian colony but those things are as fantastical now as they were back in the golden age of science-fiction. The shiny, optimistic future offered by sci-fi was a hopeless delusion and instead we are facing a dystopian reality of massive overpopulation, declining resources, disastrous climate-change and eventually the end of our civilisation.
Have a nice day.
Thanks for the topic, Sean.
I've seen it claimed that no science fiction writer predicted the internet. Whether that's true or not, I don't know.
I am always impressed that, when I was young, Captain Kirk's communicator seemed massively futuristic and now it's like he's lumbered with the worst mobile phone of all time. The thing doesn't even take pictures.
I do feel that Space:1999 has struggled to pass the prophecy test quite badly.
You do worry that the most accurate prediction of the future will turn out to be The Terminator.
Matt, I'm afraid I have no knowledge at all of Camelot 3000.
Colin, in fairness, the world's been looking like a disastrous mess for most of human history. I remain vaguely optimistic that everything looking disastrous is just how the world always is.
Steve
E M Forster's The Machine Stops mostly predicted an internet, video conferencing, social distancing and work-from-home around 1909. It was definitely still on the English Literature O'level syllabus (London board) in 1984. As were Great Expectations, Twelfth Night and the bumper book of narrative verse (although none of these could really be considered science fiction).
I think it's quaint how popular the idea was that, by now, no one would really work, and we'd mostly sit around wearing shiny silver suits, with James Dean hair. Drinking blue liquids.
DW
The first thing that came to my mind upon seeing this topic was "The Jetsons". Video conferencing was the norm at Spacely Sprockets, apparently. We did catch up with that. And to some degree, household robots (but none so talented as Rosie). And though the show (as far as I recall) didn't have a specific time frame, I'm still disappointed that we don't have flying cars.
Regarding Benedictine Cumberland- I really liked his Dr. Strange, and look forward to seeing the new film.
Oh, Colin- I noticed a piece on BBC yesterday about the discovery of an impressive Pterosaur in Skye. The paleontological Renaissance continues!
The shiny silver suits were the 60s and 70s DW - by the 80s in the future we were all going to be in long coats and designer stubble or leather jackets and mohicans as we strode through gloomy neon-lit cities in the rain.
Just in case anyone wants to argue that E M Forster wasn't a 'science-fiction' writer - theres always one, eh? (admittedly often me) - I'll add that John Brunner also predicted the internet in his 1968 novel set in a 2010 dominated by a deindustrializing US and rising China 'Stand on Zanzibar', with a supercomputer that has a lot of terminals and a kind of interactive television.
By '75 he was writing a story about computer networks, viruses and whatnot with 'Shockwave Rider'.
Theres also an internet - admittedly a slightly implausible analogue one - in Norman Spinrad's 1969 novel 'Bug Jack Barron', about a reality tv personality running for president.
More impressively, a couple of years earlier his political, sci-fi thriller 'Agent of Chaos' (1967) foresaw the rise of Boris Johnson. Seriously - thats the main characters name.
"Boris Johnson was quite willing to babble on - and did so at every opportunity - but the man was a fool." Uncanny, isn't it?
-sean
Steve, I was pointing out the massive difference between what science-fiction promised us (interstellar spaceships, sight-seeing tours to Jupiter and endless leisure time as robots served us gin & tonic) with the increasingly dystopian reality (Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nadine Dorries).
It's true that sci-fi has a dystopian element too, like Blake's 7, but even Blake's 7 had spaceships!
Red, I hadn't heard about the pterosaur on Skye but I shall google it immediately!
When it comes to comics I reckon Jack Kirby's OMAC and the conceptually similar - but much longer lasting Judge Dredd - are very prescient takes on the world that was (then) coming.
Actually Dredd still is, at least when John Wagner's writing. Its kind of amazing how it can still be pretty good at this point.
If you were into Dredd when Brian Bolland was drawing it, the first issue of Camelot 3000 was a bit of an event. But while it looked good (obviously) I have to say I found reading it a little disappointing... it seemed a bit too generic.
Steve, did you see that 80s tv series back in the day A Very British Coup, in which fictional peoples republic of Sheffield MP Harry Perkins becomes prime minister and turns the whole of the UK into a nuclear free zone with cheap bus fares?
Talk about implausible. As if that would ever happen!
-sean
But Colin, what about Boris Johnson's Space Command?
-sean
The issue with depicting life in the future is that they always overstated the speed and reach of any change. But they got a fair amount right, back in the 1960’s they predicted that we would be able to choose the sex of our children by the year 2000 . Arthur C. Clarke was pretty spot on in many cases and in the mid-1960s he predicted wireless communications and even stated that “….. It will be possible by early 2000 that we may have brain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand." which can/could be done now with robotic remote surgery. And it does seems that time travel is possible as only that can explain the presence of Jacob Rees-Mogg from the Dickensian era to todays 21st century.
Sadly the really big SF promises that I am sure we all wanted are sadly not yet here. I’m still waiting for a hover board as promised in "Back to the Future" and I have now officially given upon ever buying a pair of rocket boots – darn those cheap 1950s SF TV reruns so full of promise!. We still haven’t got “real” cloning right (a sheep doesn’t count!) as in cloning a real human from scratch so he/she appears fully formed and we can also forget all about the High Evolutionary’s work in accelerating the evolution of animals ….for now . Probably the one I thought that we would have by now (as Colin and Sean mentioned) is convenient commercial space travel (although it’s getting there) but we are not going to be able to traverse the Universe in a large spaceships like the Enterprise or whatever the Guardians of the Galaxy use for many years yet. And despite what many Ancient Alien theorists say we still have not colonised the moon. And where are those damn apes we were promised ?
Sean: Ever read any Clifford Simak books? They are great and have some lovely quaint ideas about the future. Simak has interstellar travel, time travel and artifical intelligence existing alongside stamp collectors, postmen and old-fashioned farmers.
I'd recommend his books (especially Eay Station, which looks like a sci-fi book but is really a touching story of loneliness) to anyone who's never read them- he was a great writer!
SEAN - If Sheffield is forever trapped between the past and the future, as that video stated on the origins of synth / new wave music, then it suggests "time" does not apply to Sheffield and your question of past predictions of the future is set in the present?
One thing that STAR TREK predicted that didn’t come true : Khan Noonien Singh and his genetically modified superpeople attempting to subjugate the Earth in the late 20th Century. Thank goodness! And if you think I bring this up just so I can take one last cheap shot at Beelzebub Clusterf**k, you are not entirely wrong.
b.t.
Not sure thats the ONLY thing that Star Trek didn't get right b.t., but all the same - I'm still anticipating Irish unification in 2024.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbSGp4WIBsQ
Only a couple of years to go now!
-sean
Dave, I'm not familiar with Simak's work. Generally, American 'golden age' science fiction doesn't do that much for me, compared to the writers that came afterwards. But theres always exceptions, like AE Van Vogt and Alfred Bester... so feel free to recommend a book or two and I'll probably give 'em a try at some point.
-sean
DW, thanks for that E M Forster info. I must confess that E M Forster was probably the last person I would have expected to predict the internet.
Sean, thanks for the John Brunner and Norman Spinrad info. Spinrad was clearly a man of great foresight.
I did indeed see A Very British Coup, although my memories of it are very vague.
Well Sean — I couldn’t think of any other Pop Culture Sci-fi Predictions That Didn’t Come To Pass that have even the slightest connection to Birkenstock Stumblebum. I saw that tiny little opening and i went for it (because I’m apparently unable to stop flogging that particular dead horse).
My brothers and I saw 2001 in the theatre (probably not in ‘68, most likely on a re-release a few years later) . Afterwards, one of us realized we’d probably still be alive in 2001, and instead of wondering whether or not Pan Am would really have regularly scheduled commercial space flights or if we’d be sending out huge space-ships to Jupiter piloted by talking computers, we were just freaked out about how far away that was, and that we’d all be REALLY OLD then :)
b.t.
Ok b.t., fair enough having a go at Wimbledon Tennismatch (hey, its not very close, but it is the name from the generator that really made me laugh).
I think the reason space travel didn't work out as predicted by 2001 is because Kubrick concentrated too much on the science, and not enough on the economic and social realities of the future.
He thought the space race would carry on as it had, as the film was made well into the long post-war economic boom and people don't expect them to end. But of course they do - capitalism can't escape the tendency of the rate of profit to fall - and then everyone's less optimistic and can't find the money to pay for those trips to the moon anymore.
So five years after '68, you've got the energy crisis, and the future is Soylent Green, and by the start of the 80s the early 21st century in films is the more chaotic world of Blade Runner.
-sean
Dave - oops, I see you did suggest a book. Ok, I'll put that on my list.
-sean
Oh and CAMELOT 3000 was indeed quite the disappointment. Everything about it seemed incredibly obvious and predictable (exçept maybe the gender-swap twist on the Tristan / Isolde romance). Even Bolland’s Arthur design looked like a bland, brightly-colored ‘superhero’ outfit. The entire project was awkwardly Neither Fish Nor Fowl. It’s as if DC wanted to sit at the Cool Kids’ table SO BAD, but were still listening to Pat Boone records so they had nothing to talk about with the ACTUAL Cool Kids.
b.t.
Steve-
You didn't miss anything by not reading CAMELOT 3000, like most Marvel UK titles.
That's a good point Sean. In two years time all the sci fi will be based upon pandemic virus.
KD
Camelot 3000 was DC and so perhaps I'm missing a joke re. Marvel UK?
DW
KD
Sorry, just got it (d'oh)
DW
Sean- I'll recommend you a Simak short story too: A Death In The House.
Lovely little story which uses science-fiction ideas to tell a tale about friendship.
Simak's ideas are often surprisingly modern, but his prose sometimes reads more like Mark Twain than, for instance Issac Asimov.
And, he wrote a novel about a time traveler with two hearts years before Doctor Who was created!
Thanks Dave - had a look online and it seems 'Death in the House' is a fairly well regarded anthology of his work, so I might give that a try as a way in
On Camelot 3000, I think it also suffered from game changing comics like American Flagg #1 and Swamp Thing #21 coming out during its run.
Like Jim Starlin's Dreadstar from Marvel/Epic - which debuted a month earlier (I looked it up) - Camelot 3000 made sense as a shot at the new direct sales market in late '82, but seemed a bit old skool fairly quickly.
-sean
Steve, are the Russians at Asda yet?
-sean
Russia has invaded Ukraine! World War III has begun! THE END IS NIGH!
Oh, hold on - Boris is threatening some more "sanctions" so that's Putin sorted out, hurrah!
Not yet, Sean.
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