Now that we have emerged alive (somehow) from 2023, it’s time to see what science fiction writers of the past predict for the new year, and how well we’ve done to live up to those expectations. The good news, I am pleased to report, is that we fail on most accounts, as most science fiction writers expected a nuclear apocalypse by now. The bad news is it’s only January, and there’s still plenty time for those missiles to fly! Here are a few things writers of the past expected 2024 to have.
A Radioactive Wasteland
When Harlan Ellison published A Boy and His Dog in 1969, and its various sequels in prose and comic form, he wasn’t optimistic about things. In his telling of events, because John F. Kennedy survived the assassination attempt, the Cold War lasted a little longer. When the Third War finally broke out, technology was further along than happened in the real world, and weapons-makers were a bit more… inventive. Consider that in the war, one of America’s best weapons turned out not to be the nuclear bomb, but rather, the “skirmisher dog”: telepathic dogs that could find fuel, hostiles, poison gas, and sense radiation. Ellison described them as “shock commandos of a new kind of war.”
When the war was done, and the fallout from the world’s atomic weapons settled, the world was left in cinders. Some survivors banded together as marauding hoards called “roverpaks” and others—such as the story’s protagonist—went it solo. The most precious “commodity” in this world are women, most of whom were killed by atomic bombs while the men were off fighting on the front lines.
The more I learn about the Cold War, the more astonishing it is that the human race didn’t wipe itself off the map, if only by accident. So Ellison got that wrong, clearly. Another thing he got wrong was where women would be when the war came. Until a decade ago, women were not allowed to serve in ground combat roles. That’s not to say they didn’t serve in combat, of course. (The notion of “front lines” changed considerably after 2001.) Today, women make up about 16% of the military. There are fewer than 2,000 women in combat specialties (depending on how you define it), but given the severity of the recruiting crisis, I expect that number to grow by World War III.
An Artificial Ozone Layer
The Highlander, filmed in 1986, is one of those all-time great low-budget, high-concept films: a Scottish immortal from the 1500s does battle against other immortals across the centuries, until only one remains. The last immortal standing wins the “prize” of mortality. For what it was, it was a masterpiece. As you’ve had almost forty years to watch it, I don’t mind spoiling the ending: our hero from Scotland slays the final foe, and earns his old age.
This was a huge problem when the film became a cult hit on home video. How do you make a sequel about immortals doing battle when the hero has no one to fight, and isn’t even immortal anymore?
The answer: You get really, really weird. In short: Unbeknownst to all in the first film, they are actually aliens from the desert planet Zeist, imprisoned on Earth. (Why are they immortal on Earth? Unclear. Why do they fight here? Also unclear. Why don’t they remember they are aliens from another planet? Again, unclear. Look, do you want to see more sword fighting with Sean Connery and Christopher Lambert or not?)
In 1991, when they made Highlander 2: The Quickening, 2024 seemed pretty far off. At the time, there was a hole in the ozone layer, and the screenwriters put two and two together and said: What if the ozone layer is gone in the future? What if a private company produces an artificial ozone layer? What if that company was corrupt and evil? This is not a bad concept for a film! The alien immortals, though? That is a bad concept for a film.
Here in the real world, while the ozone layer isn’t the problem it once was, the environment is indeed a huge national security concern. The Pentagon is optimizing for everything from climate-induced political instability abroad (think: water availability and arable land intensifying African conflicts) to training soldiers to fight in extreme weather (for example, a more easily accessed Arctic, and eventually Antarctic).
The Second Mission to Mars
In 1971, Wernher von Braun, who got America to the moon, presented a plan to the Nixon administration to go to Mars. The Nixon people instead pulled the plug on everything, and that was the end of Apollo. The first Bush administration had a Moon-Mars plan, but Congress killed it. The second Bush administration, too, but the Obama administration killed it as well. The Obama administration offered its own asteroid-Mars plan, but the Trump administration killed it for a Moon (and now Moon-Mars) program called Artemis.
Presently, NASA’s ballpark estimation for going to Mars: about 20 years from now. SpaceX, however, is much more ambitious on the Mars front, and if you asked me when we would see an American on Mars, I would tell you by the mid-2030s—and that would be an ambitious program.
I think if you had asked anyone in 1964 when we would land on Mars, however, you’d get something pretty ambitious. Maybe 2000, on the outside. (The first satellite in space had only just happened in 1957, after all, and already Kennedy had promised men on the moon by the end of the Sixties!) So it is incredibly impressive that an episode of the Outer Limits called 2021 as the year men landed on Mars.
It’s also the year that both astronauts died on the Martian surface in unspeakable agony. In 2024, however, NASA sent a second mission to Mars to figure out what happened to the first. The answer? Sand-beasts, and a whole army of them. Our nuclear bazookas (another failed prediction, alas) barely put a dent in them, and we abandoned our Mars exploration efforts.
Battle Mechs
When the dinosaur-like Kaiju aliens began climbing from the Pacific Ocean in 2013, humans built giant battle mechs called Jaegers to fight them. In the Pacific Rim universe, the war is going pretty badly by 2024, and next year, humanity is going to consider just building giant walls to deal with the problem, which is no fun at all.
Here in the real world, I refuse to believe that it is technically too difficult to build battle mechs. If we can vertically land orbital super rockets, we can darn well build giant robots on two legs. You think China would mess with us if we had a squadron of Gundam Mobile Suits at our disposal? Yes, yes, military strategists think mechs are a bad idea, tactically. But they also thought the F-22 was a good idea. I say they’re thinking small and conventional. Take a look at this John Deere walking harvester and tell me a couple missile batteries on the side and a tank turret on top wouldn’t clean up the situation in Ukraine in about three seconds?
There’s still hope, of course. There’s a lot of 2024 left.
