[This post, from 9 December 2011, can be found here, and you know with a column as nerdy as this one, there would be a lot of comments (including people taking Greg to task for forgetting Space: 1999, which he regretted immediately)! How many more “future events” can we add in the intervening years? Chime in if you know any! Enjoy!]
Today, as I write this, it’s December of 2011.
I know. Duh. But think about it for a moment in terms of pop culture.
That means we are thirty-six years past 1975 … the date of the end of the world in The Omega Man.
We are thirty-two years past 1979 … the date of the suspended-animation experiment that put Dylan Hunt to sleep for 154 years in Genesis II.
1982 was the first year of the Seaview‘s regular patrol of the Pacific Ocean, where Admiral Nelson, Captain Crane, and the rest of the crew averted any number of natural disasters, alien invasions, and supernatural menaces that threatened the existence of the human race.
It was back in 1983 that the sub-orbital passenger ship Spindrift was lost in a space anomaly somewhere in mid-flight between Los Angeles and London …
Speaking of space anomalies, 1987 is when Captain Anthony “Buck” Rogers disappeared into one while piloting the shuttle Ranger III.
It was way back in 1990 that Luther Manning awoke in a hellish post-apocalyptic landscape as the cyborg Deathlok the Demolisher.
Of course, 1992 was the first year of the eight-year drought that followed the 1988 famine … or “The End,” as described in Sabre.
The Eugenics Wars raged from 1993 to 1996, ending with Khan Noonien Singh and a few of his followers fleeing the planet in the experimental sleeper ship Botany Bay.
What’s more, the environmental collapse of 1982 eventually led to the Bionic Wars in the 1990s, resulting in the nuclear devastation of western Canada in 1995. That’s right around the time young Vance Astrovik embarked on the first official manned flight to another star system, also in a sleeper ship.
1996, of course, was “the Year of the Domino,” when everything went to hell.
1997 was the year of the ill-fated launch of the Jupiter 2, the Robinson family’s research vessel that went missing and was presumed “lost in space.”
2001 was the year the deep-space research ship Discovery under the command of Dave Bowman was lost with all hands somewhere around the orbit of Jupiter …
It was also the first year of the second Martian invasion.
Last year, 2010, was the year Dr. Heywood Floyd led a combined U.S.-Soviet mission to the moons of Jupiter in hopes of salvaging the space vessel Discovery and reactivating its sentient computer system HAL 9000, to find out what exactly had happened to commander Dave Bowman.
Quite a list, isn’t it?
I was seven and a half when we landed on the moon in 1969. Now it’s almost Christmas of 2011, forty-two years later, and I’ve grown up with all that future history.
And I still don’t have my goddamn jetpack.
Granted, I’m not living as a human fugitive from the Martian invaders, or shooting feral mutants that are trying to get at our food supply, or any of that stuff, either.
… but I still want the jetpack. And the lunar settlement. And Pan Am commercial flights to the space station. And all the rest of it. My generation got robbed.
Bah humbug.
Now we can, in fact, add the dystopian future from “Days of Future Past” (2013) that I mentioned in the comments back then.
Other “futures” that are now in our past include the pretty rosy 2015 of Back to the Future II (not only do we not have jetpacks, we don’t have hoverboards, either!) and the anything-but-rosy 2019 of Blade Runner (at least they have flying cars).
And this year Benjamin Sisko will play a key role in the Bell Riots in San Francisco…
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I wrote a piece for Geekdad back in January 2013 listing all the dystopian futures that involved that year, ranging from Escape from New York to A Scanner Darkly, plus Bart & Lisa Simpson’s graduation from high school.
Just in time for COVID, the Sealab facility became operational. A year later, everyone started really acting strangely.
Captain Future was patrolling the spaceways in the far off year of 1990.
In 1997, Pvt William Mandella departs on his first expedition, to Charon, to fight the Taurans, with The United Nations Expeditionary Force, in what will be known as The Forever War. He is due back on Earth, here, at any moment. Of course, most of us don’t work and are too strung out on dope to go meet him and his fellow veterans.