When we reach for past visions of the future to measure against our reality, we tend to land on the dystopian ones. Most frequently that’s picking at the still itching scab of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or the terrifying brushed aluminium smoothness of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In recent years, we’ve passed the hoverboard-filled future of 2015 that Marty McFly was flung into in Back to the Future Part II (1989) and the 2019 world of ultra-realistic androids gone rogue depicted in Blade Runner (1982). Our present doesn’t much resemble either movie any more than the bright and breezy robot-assisted lives of The Jetsons (1962) – set in 2065 – look likely to be just around the corner.
More futures past are rushing towards us: In 2025, we’ll reach the year in which Stephen King set his bleak novel, The Running Man (1982), where a US on the brink of economic collapse entertains itself by watching desperate citizens on deadly reality TV shows. In 2026, we’ll hit the timeline of Ray Bradbury’s short story There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) which depicted the world as a blasted nuclear wasteland.
Imagining a better world is still possible. In 2020, the speculative fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, who’d previously expended most of his creative energy on stories set in the far future on space colonies, returned to Earth. His novel The Ministry for the Future opens in 2025 and though it puts the planet and humanity through a series of plausible catastrophes, it is ultimately an anti-dystopian vision. The climate crisis acts as a catalyst for humanity to unite to find scientific solutions and combat inequality. In a 2022 interview with The New York Times, Robinson said he could see a near future marked by “human accomplishment and solidarity”.
Ideas presented in Robinson’s fiction – geoengineering to stop glacial melting, switching out planes for solar-powered airships, a kind of carbon quantitative easing – were treated seriously when he appeared at the United Nations climate summit in 2021. One of the UK’s representatives at the talks, Nigel Topping, called them “deeply researched, plausible futures”. Robinson writes in that mode because he believes that “we live in a big science fiction novel we are all writing together” and that “if you want to write a novel about our world now, you’d better write science fiction, or you will be doing some kind of inadvertent nostalgia piece”.
As AI begins to intrude on so many aspects of our lives, with corporations and governments pushing for many more ways for it to be involved, it can feel like the dystopian shadow is growing. But rowing back a little further into the recent past, another writer with a taste for utopian futures – Iain M Banks – offered a positive vision of how we might live our lives alongside intelligent technology. In 2015, Banks told The Atlantic: “I’m optimistic that we can design our future society/civilisation to get right the balance of work/leisure, effort/fun and feeling-exploited/feeling-useful. In fact, I’m so optimistic about it that I think we could probably do it ourselves without having to ask the adults to help (umm… the AIs are the adults here, just to be clear.)”
As AI begins to intrude on so many aspects of our lives, it can feel like the dystopian shadow is growing
In Banks’ Culture series, the Minds – highly advanced AIs – take charge of most of the planning and administration in a post-scarcity society where the humanoid population can spend their days largely as they want. It’s socialist wish-fulfilment which the author created as a rejection of both current-day capitalism and the dystopian direction of a lot of science fiction. It’s not that reading the Culture novels offers a blueprint for a world we might construct in the near future but that it holds on to the idea that our direction of travel is not inevitable.
To look at past visions of the future as predictions is tempting but it’s also a mistake. In the introduction to her book The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin writes that “strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive… somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life”. Though she wrote stories set in possible futures, Le Guin said she was engaged in thought experiments rather than attempted prophecy: “I write science fiction and science fiction isn’t about the future. I don’t know any more about the future than you do and very likely less.”
The benefit of reaching for works that imagine better outcomes for humanity rather than those that play to our pessimism is that they can inspire us to change. When we wallow in the dystopian, failure seems to be inevitable. It’s much easier to complain that the future of jet packs and flying cars you were promised has not come to pass than it is to realise that our species has prevailed for so long because of its ability to adapt and develop solutions to great challenges.
The problem, of course, is that it’s easier to write a dystopia than a utopia. Dystopias demand drama, intrigue, and violence. Utopias require cooperation, peace, and the kind of emotions that tend to write white. Francis Ford Coppola’s forthcoming passion project, Megalopolis – about an architect attempting to build his utopian vision – was slammed in The Guardian’s preview as offering “bland, doughy rhetoric about humanity’s potential”. Perhaps the lesson to take from the history of imagining the future is that a better one might also be a more boring one.
Mic Wright is a journalist based in London. He writes about technology, culture and politics
