Yesterday's Tomorrows

Any Resemblance To Actual Future Is Purely Coincidental

—Futurama

As far back as ancient times, people have been trying to imagine what the future would look like. A tale from India in the 9th century BCE imagines a king who returns from a brief visit with the gods to find that millions of years have passed and society has decayed. An 8th century Japanese legend has a fisherman traveling 300 years into the future, where his home and family are long gone. Since at least the 19th century, people have speculated on what society might look like, fifty or a hundred years down the road.

Most of the time, their speculations are goofy, obviously dated, with wrong-headed assumptions about technology, fashion, social mores or geopolitics. One of my favorite examples is an artist's imagination in 1914 of what fashion in 1950 would be like, a couple half-naked and covered in tattoos, looking at pictures of Edwardian era fashions and snickering. Today, a couple like that would most likely be found at a rave, but in 1950 it was unthinkable.

This category, "Yesterday's Tomorrows," is a special category that I created because I needed a place to put 2001: A Space Odyssey in. Produced in 1968 and imagining the then-distant future year of 2001, it wouldn't fit into the broader timeline, nor would it fit cleanly into any of the other categories in the Banned Histories. In our 2001 we were listening to nu-metal and freaking out over 9/11; in theirs, they had cities on the moon. That's certainly not a bad future; does that mean we're the failed timeline? In geek circles, this particular phenomenon is called Zeerust, the concept of someone's idea of the future failing to match what that future actually would turn out to be. From advertisements with women in space suits hawking cleaning solution on the moon to dreams of flying cars, the past is littered with ideas of futures that never happened. But they're not necessarily dystopian; more often, they were overly optimistic. Such stories wind up here. Expect a lot of shit from before the 1970s.

Some stories evoke this deliberately; Fallout is famous for presenting a version of the future defined by the aesthetics and geopolitics (if not necessarily the social politics) of the 1950s and early 1960s, but was originally created in the mid-1990s. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a film from 2004 that presents a fever dream of a futuristic 1930s. I would tend to categorize these more as alternate histories or dystopian settings, but not always.