For the first (and probably only) time today I watched the hugely influential German 1920s sci-fi epic Metropolis (more on which here if you're not familiar with it).  I was reminded of the saying that nothing dates faster than our vision of the future.  According to IMDB the film was set in 2026, a hundred years in the future at the time.  One or two pieces of technology we have achieved - the monorail that speeds around the city looks surprisingly contemporary to 21st century eyes, and they have such a thing as a videophone.  Others we have yet to develop - the android Maria is much more sophisticated that current robot technology, despite efforts - especially in Japan - to produce a convincingly anthropomorphic robot.  Other technology is extremely old-fashioned to our eyes: steam driven machinery, ticker-tape readouts, a 'PC' that is an enormous wooden box with flashing bulbs and brass buttons.  On the other hand, the clothes are very much of the period the film was made, as are the cars, and the aircraft that can be seen buzzing about in one or two shots are boxy biplanes of a type that must have already been starting to look obsolete in the mid '20s.

Oddly enough, 2026 is also the year - according to Star Trek - that World War III will break out.  Mercifully we've still got another eleven years to find out if it will...

I'd suggest that our view of the past is at least as transient as our view of the future.

Perhaps, but at least we have some evidence for it.  Archaeological remains, documents, images etc.  Our precise interpretation may vary as new evidence emerges, new theories become popular and so on, but we have a pretty firm idea of the basics.  Depicting the future, however, especially the distant future, is far more difficult and therefore dates far more easily.  Technology is advancing at a dramatic rate, for example.  At one time it was foretold that man would travel to the moon thanks to an enormous gun.  Just as fashions change in the way we interpret history, so it is with the future.  At one stage the future was bright and shiny, sleek and sterile white.  Then it was bleak and grimy and functional.  With the success of the new Star Trek films the pendulum is perhaps starting to swing back to shininess.  On the other hand the new Star Wars films (futuristic, if technically set in the past - albeit in an alien galaxy) will bring back the brand of realism that was always the franchise's trademark.  (The elaborate and complex 'Expanded Universe' of the Star Wars franchise could itself be likened to the evolution of interpreted history, but that perhaps is for another thread).

Surely good science fiction (not Star Wars which is just Space Opera, and near kin to Wild West stories) is a commentary on today - and what sort of tomorrow that is likely to bring, so not to be regarded as "prophecy"?

When Star Trek was on, particularly the Voyager series, the electronic reports were very futuristic but now we have tablets they look rather commonplace.

Watching Doctor Who: The Ark in Space (one of the 1970s Tom Baker ones) - apparently in the 30th century the entirety of human knowledge will be saved on microfilm!

Anglo-Norman wrote:

Watching Doctor Who: The Ark in Space (one of the 1970s Tom Baker ones) - apparently in the 30th century the entirety of human knowledge will be saved on microfilm!

Plausible. However, there will be no technology capable of reading it, so our descendants will be wholly ignorant of all topics........ a bit like the current situation where you have to store 6 years worth of accounts data. Electronic form is OK. Anyone take a guess how they will retreive it from (say) a zip disk?

Indeed. I can't even access my history degree dissertation from 2005 - saved, as it was, on a floppy disk. Mercifully I still have it on paper.

Anglo-Norman wrote:

the hugely influential German 1920s sci-fi epic Metropolis...set in 2026, a hundred years in the future at the time...2026 is also the year - according to Star Trek - that World War III will break out.

The following decade H.G. Wells’ 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come predicted that the Second World War would break out in 1940. He said that it would begin between Germany and Poland - ‘it was only in 1940 that actual warfare broke out … that ingenious contrivance of President Wilson's, the Polish Corridor, Poland's "access to the sea", was the particular mine that exploded first’. He anticipated the future Polish-German border settlement ‘along a line between Stettin and the Bohemian frontier'. Wells also envisaged a poison gas attack on Nanking taking place in 1935 which pre-echoed the massacre there in 1937.

Further in the future he guessed that a ‘World Encyclopaedia Establishment’, would be founded in 2012. This can be seen as either reference to the advent of the internet in the 1960s, or the launch of the world wide web in the 1990s or merely just that founding of Wikipedia in 2001 (so just 11 years out in that latter case). Wells also foresaw the agricultural revolution of the 1950s and 60s and the advent of genetic engineering in the 1970s. He thought that these would occur simultaneously in what he described as a ‘keying-up … of a “nitrogen-starved world”’ but said that this wouldn’t begin until 2047.

The 1936 film Things to Come (with the screenplay written by Wells himself) telescopes much of the book’s details and varyingly compresses and extends phases in it. For instance, in the book the war begins in 1940 and ends in 1950 whereas in the film it lasts until the 1960s. In the book, a ‘Council of World Affairs’ in Basra using its ‘Air and Sea Control’ begins a bid for world hegemony in 1965 and this is a drawn-out process lasting until 1978 after which an ‘Air Dictatorship’ is established. In the film, however, the organisation ‘Wings Over the World’ sweep all independent states away within the year 1970.
 
The year 2036 doesn’t feature in the book although in the film it is 100 years in the future and is the year when the grandchildren of the 1970 protagonists attempt a launch to the Moon. Wells was out by 2 generations and 67 years here. Indeed, in the book there is no mention of a moonshot or spaceflight at all, rather the year 2033 (100 years on from the book’s publication) sees humanity eradicate bubonic plague.

The message of the book and the film is subject to varied interpretation. Some see it as an indictment of totalitarianism and technocracy while others see it as condoning same. The timing of the film’s release was particularly interesting in this respect. The film wasn’t released in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany although a German-language version was produced called Die Welt in 100 Jahren which was shown in Switzerland and also in Austria up until the 1938 Anschluss. There was also an Italian-language version issued which was distributed in Italy by the Mander Film company in 1937. Some say that Mussolini’s censors subsequently backtracked on their original approval of the film and suppressed it while others say that this wasn’t so and that the film enjoyed a full and unedited run in Italian cinemas.



(A poster by Italy’s Minerva Film company for the re-release of the film in 1953. The fact that the film warranted re-releasing in Italy suggests that the redaction/suppression story was probably true.)

Vizzer wrote:

The following decade H.G. Wells’ 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come predicted that the Second World War would break out in 1940. He said that it would begin between Germany and Poland - ‘it was only in 1940 that actual warfare broke out … that ingenious contrivance of President Wilson's, the Polish Corridor, Poland's "access to the sea", was the particular mine that exploded first’. He anticipated the future Polish-German border settlement ‘along a line between Stettin and the Bohemian frontier'. Wells also envisaged a poison gas attack on Nanking taking place in 1935 which pre-echoed the massacre there in 1937.

The Shape of Things to Come is accurately prophetic in many aspects, but that's perhaps not so surprising given its 1933 publication date. I suspect many have been impressed with Wells' supposedly accurate 'predictions of the future' simply because they mostly associate him with his well-known 'Victorian' science-fiction works dating from around the last decade of 19th century. Many probably completely forget that Wells continued as an acute political commentator (both home and abroad) well into the 1930s and 40s. And frankly it should not be so very hard to predict what's going to happen in the later 1930s, when one is already observing the on-going events of just a couple of years earlier.

When The Shape of Things to Come was published in September 1933 many commentators could already see what was likely - not guaranteed but certainly likely -  to develop in Germany. The Nazi Party, with its anti-Marxist policy and vocal opposition to the democratic post-war government of the Weimar Republic and the Treaty of Versailles, was already by 1930 advocating extreme nationalism and Pan-Germanism as well as virulent antisemitism. The Nazis had won the greatest share of the popular vote in the two Reichstag general elections in 1932 making them the largest party in the legislature by far, albeit still short of an outright majority. Following these elections Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in March 1933 and had promptly introduced the Enabling Act of 1933 granting him expanded authority. In the 1930s, especially after the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazi Germany and other nascent fascist regimes) the survival of European democracy seemed in doubt. Wells, not a great supporter of democracy even in its more robust times, clearly shared that outlook.

Wells' predictions of the serial bombing of whole cities in The Shape of Things to Come is not really that revolutionary: European cities, London amongst them, had been extensively bombed in WW1; the British had used 'aerial policing', ie bombing of civilian targets during the Iraqi revolt of the 1920s; and the devastating bombing of Guernica was only four years away into the future. Furthermore Wells envisioned the great European war starting in 1940 as a result of a long-term economic slump - while in reality when his book was published the the Great Depression was already well under way following the Wall Street stock market crash of 29 October 1929, so no real surprise or revelation there. Wells also wrongly thought that land fighting in the second great war would quickly become bogged down (as did indeed happen in WW1) but that tanks would then prove completely ineffective (despite them having been evidently very effective in breaking through the trench-war stalemate in WW1). But he did envision that submarines would become the launching pads for "air torpedoes", like submarine-launched ballistic missiles, carrying weapons of mass destruction which enabled nations to threaten the destruction of places halfway around the world. This certainly has come to reality, though in later decades, not in WW2.

A far more visionary book, I think, is The World Set Free, which Wells wrote in 1913 and published just before WW1 broke out. In it he envisioned weapons of mass destruction whose explosive incendiary power is based on nuclear fission. Physicists of the time, such as the Curies, Becquerel, Geiger, Crookes, Chadwick, Ramsay, Rutherford and Soddy, were well aware that the slow natural radioactive decay of elements like radium continues for thousands of years, and that while the rate of energy release is negligible, the total amount released over time is huge. Wells used this as the basis for his story whereby a method is developed to get radioactive material - the fictional element carolinum - to spontaneously disintegrate, thereby releasing vast amounts of thermal energy and harmful radiation in "a blazing continual explosion". In Wells' narrative the introduction of atomic energy means that there will be "either the relapse of mankind to agricultural barbarism from which it had emerged so painfully, or the acceptance of achieved science as the basis of a new social order." He thus presented a world government as the solution to the threat of nuclear weapons, meanwhile abundant atomic energy solves the problem of work and in the new utopian society "the majority of our population consists of artists." Just to recall, this was written before WW1.

Wells was of course very well-read in scientific matters  - he'd taken a General Science degree at the Royal College of Science in London (now a part of Imperial College) - but even so his knowledge of atomic physics, then a very specialist subject at the very leading edge of scientific research, is surprising. Wells's novel may even have influenced the development of nuclear weapons as the physicist Leó Szilárd read the book in 1932, the same year the neutron was discovered. In 1933 Szilárd conceived the idea of neutron chain reaction and filed for patents on it in 1934.