When I saw a Guardian headline warning the world that Gordon Brown was set to unveil his predictions for 2025, I thought I was reading The Onion. Oddly, yet predictably, it turns out I wasn’t. After all, Gordon’s exactly the kind of guy who thinks that everyone will benefit (if not exactly be entertained by) from his dour yet pragmatically idealistic vision of the world. And what will Gordon’s world look like? Apart from offices around the world being dominated by tyrannical, Scottish micro managers, 2025 will boast “one billion university graduates” who will often eschew the traditional family life in order to live a single life full of rapid career advancement. This ties up with Brown’s media-friendly blueprint for women in the 21st century. He writes of a “higher form of empowerment”, although it sounds like he might just be talking about this:
Still, our former leader isn’t exactly alone when it comes to futurology. We’ve spent the whole of history thinking about the future and getting it totally wrong. Blade Runner is set in 2019, but are we surrounded by replicants now? Maybe they’ll all appear in the next seven years. As for 1984 well, I know Thatcher was kind of bad, but she wasn’t really stamping on your face forever was she? The totalitarian vibe, as seen in Brazil, Gattaca, We and Brave New World always cuts to the heart of an element of our society, or the whole of our society if our society is also Stalin/ Mao’s society, but it also always ends up over egging the dark, alienated pudding. That’s understandable, of course. 1984 wouldn’t be as exciting if it was about people living in the suburbs and going to work in banks and high street sandwich retailers. Somehow our visions of the future often fail to take into account our realities of the present. Utopian readings of the future re-cast human beings as endlessly inventive, clean and collected types ready to speed off to the all-friendly disco in the sky just after happily watching their compliant domestic robots collect all the rubbish in their house and deposit it in a magically efficient vaporizing dustbin. Doom-laden visions of the future see us all living in pods, controlled by an elite bureaucracy of shadowy politician types or, as in Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, Simon Cowell types. Still, where’s my jetpack? I want to ride drunkenly through the air to my doom. Here are some different visions of the future:
In 1863 Jules Verne wrote a book called Paris in the Twentieth Century which imagined what his hometown would be like in 1960. It mainly seems to have been about Zeppelins hovering around the Eiffel Tower, ready to let people out into their Aerocar parking lots. If it has the feeling of a Ghostly Galleon ride at a theme park then Jules has succeeded. After all, the future’s meant to be fun, right? Like, ropes on the Eiffel Tower fun.
Flying is obviously a big thing in the future. We’ve always had a massive hard-on for flying because it’s basically the one thing we can’t do that other things can do (fucking birds). In Villemard’s visions of the future, illustrated in 1910, the emergency services have elaborate wings that enable them to fly to the aid of those in trouble. They are like benevolent wasps, buzzing through the air looking for the brightest thing around them.
In Ziggy Stardust’s future, everyone is really free and easy with the sex. There’s a lot of just not wearing any trousers and hanging out in cat suits. In the end, Ziggy’s promiscuous ways and his fans kill him but maybe Bowie’s vision of the future was more accurate than anything science fiction has come up with. After all, have you seen Shame? That’s basically like Ziggy Stardust but you know, really bleak.
This is from Blade Runner. The whole, faces and logos on buildings thing has definitely happened. The future is often seen as being a bit like Tokyo. Globalisation always seems to end up meaning “Japanese”. Western filmmakers and writers like to look at Japan as the baffling, ultra-modern other: “How can they not be from the future? Their language is so weird! They love gadgets! They all live in pods”!
And then there are the robots, as best shown in 2001: A Space Odyssey. We make them and they make our lives so much easier but then a guilt reflex kicks in and mankind must be punished for making his life to easy. It’s like you’ve spent your whole life waking up at 10 and then boom, it’s dawn and you are being battered out of bed by a drill sergeant with a bucket of water and a plank of wood. Comfort and ease can only last so long. The servant will become the master. The thing you have created (the disciple robot) will end up betraying you (Jesus). And he won’t even do it for 30 pieces of silver.
We may be flying everywhere but by golly there’ll always be time for a drink. What’s great about a lot of depictions of the future is that even though everyone is flying around in grand cities, fashion has not changed. As far as Villemard is concerned, the year 2000 will be entirely different except that we’ll all still be dressed like Edwardian Ladies and Gents. The same goes for dystopian films like Brazil, in which everyone wears suits to fit in to the grey, stultifying and ultimately terrifying world in which they live. Because what equals bureaucratic dictatorship? That’s right, square: A SUIT!
A less Science Fiction orientated variant on the dystopian future is the post-apocalyptic future. The world we live in, as in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, has been decimated by an environmental disaster, no doubt one caused by the bloody hubris of selfish humans.
The world is scorched. Ash blows, it billows, the clouds it forms look like a murder of crows. It plunges down on the Earth’s last inhabitants, clinging to life because that is all they know. Roaming gangs of cannibals abound. Everyone, even the children, has a beard and badly moisturised skin. (See also Nevil Shute’s On the Beach)
Imagine these figures are all university graduates who just aren’t down with the whole monogamy thing. That’s Gordon Brown’s future. It’s urban, it’s crowded, it’s sexy. Sexy like this:
I don’t know how the world will end up but I’m pretty sure Gordon Brown’s book won’t fly off the shelves. Still, if I get to choose what our end looks like, then this is what I go for:
Bring me my airship Jeeves!