I am a podcaster. This is not a career I could’ve envisioned in the past. That word would’ve made no sense to me when I graduated college. So many aspects of my life which now feel mundane would’ve felt futuristic to me back then.
In my podcast, Imaginary Worlds, I’ve often looked at futures that were created long ago. Some of those visions of the future have already become our past, like the Star Trek communicator which inspired the now outdated flip phones. I’ve looked at futuristic scenarios that we’re just beginning to experience, like the promise and threat of AI. And I’ve looked at futures yet to come. I knew the future would be a subject I’d never grow tired of because I’m a huge science fiction fan. But to my surprise, I have grown weary of the future itself.
As a child, I used to dream of flying cars and talking to computers. My adult visions of the future feel more like an ominous homework assignment – or else we’ll flunk civilization class. When I walk around New York, I wonder which neighborhoods will be underwater in 100 years, what a hot summer day will feel like in the 2120s, and what species will have migrated from the American South that were never here before. I also wonder how I’ll handle this rapidly changing environment in my old age.
What gives me hope is seeing solutions, like proposals for oyster reefs in New York Harbor to mitigate rising sea levels or visionary layouts of floating neighborhoods in the Hudson River that rise with the tides. I'm hopeful when I see artwork or read novels set in the solarpunk genre, where everyday people use affordable, green technology to create smart hacks to remake our environment when we’ve lost control of the natural one. What doesn’t fill me with hope? Flying cars.
I often quote the mid-20th-century writer Frederik Pohl on my podcast. He famously said, “A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” This is literally the problem with tech moguls who haven’t let go of their childhood fantasies of flying cars. I dread looking up and seeing a snarling traffic jam during an otherwise beautiful sunset – let alone a rogue car that crashes into a building. That was fun in The Fifth Element, not so much over Fifth Avenue.
I also think of Pohl whenever I hear about the promise of VR, geoengineering and space colonies on Mars. I even think of Pohl’s observation when I see visions of a future America at the 1939 World’s Fair, which was themed 'the world of tomorrow'. In hindsight, I can see that the wondrous “Futurama” exhibit of highways, offramps and office towers was uninspiringly accurate. They hardly inspire wonder today.
When it comes to science fiction, nothing dates faster than futures from the past, like the very ‘60s futuristic costume design in Barbarella or the analog technology in Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi stories. That problem is most apparent in Star Trek since it doesn’t take place in a galaxy far, far away. Star Trek is supposed to be our future. Beyond technology, even a progressive show like The Next Generation seems very hetero and cisgender today. Current futuristic ideas like transhumanism (the use of technology to improve our mind and bodies) are hardly discussed.
It’s easy to consider past sci-fi futures outdated. But once a work of sci-fi recedes far enough into the past, it can still teach us valuable lessons. For me, experiencing outdated sci-fi can be like a form of time travel. Rather than going along for the ride and experiencing what people thought would happen in the future, I’m experiencing how people thought in the past. It’s almost as if these imagined futures were collective dreams that took the input of everyday reality and mixed it up into something wild and fantastical.
During the pandemic, I became addicted to the French comics of Valérian and Laureline from the ‘70s and ‘80s. The characters are assigned missions that take them through space and time. They’re also very much in love. I relished the storyline where Valérian was sent to contemporary Paris while Laureline was exploring planets in the 28th century, but they made the effort to check in with each other like any couple whose work pulls them apart. The illustrator Jean-Claude Mézières drew Star Wars-like aliens and spaceships with stunning detail (many of them before Star Wars, critics have noted.) But I didn’t feel like I had gone to a distant galaxy. At a time when human contact was kept to a bare minimum due to COVID-19, I could vicariously experience what it must have been like to be French, young and in love after the sexual revolution, except in a universe where spacetime is malleable.
When I watch the original Star Trek series, I can feel the optimism of the 1960s in a way that’s more visceral than watching a documentary about the ‘60s. To me the innovation in Star Trek isn’t the technology, although I wouldn’t mind stepping into a transporter, as someone who hates flying on airplanes. The real innovation of Star Trek is The Federation – the utopian vision of a future where scarcity is no longer an issue, and peaceful coexistence is a shared value among different species and nationalities. That vision is apparent when looking at the diverse set of characters on the bridge of The Enterprise. I wasn’t alive in 1966 but I’ve watched network TV from back then. No other show had a cast like that. Creator Gene Roddenberry had his cultural oversights when imagining the future, but the following generations of writers took up the mantle and kept striving to update his vision as we gradually evolved.
At the same time, I can feel anxieties around nuclear war when I watch The Terminator on a gut level that’s now lost to me – even though I can remember being terrified of nuclear war when the film came out in 1984. When Kyle Reese tells Sarah Connor about the post-nuclear future he came from, the only thing that surprises her is that the nuclear war wasn't started by humans.
Today people are afraid that ChatGPT could become the start of Skynet, or the robots from Boston Dynamics are Terminators 1.0. But I think we lose sight of this cautionary tale when we focus too much on the technology itself, and not the naivety of the people who developed or funded that technology – the people who dreamed of the proverbial automobile and not the traffic jam. It can be even more frustrating when the people who are turning science fiction ideas like AI into a practical reality are dismissive of other people’s concerns. The critics warn of futuristic dystopias, while the developers respond with utopias. They can both be right; one person’s utopia can be a dystopia for many others simultaneously.
I think one of the best parts of imagined futures is that we can prepare for the inevitable fights and challenges by reminding ourselves that no matter how much the world changes, dignity, compassion and equity should always matter.
I feel those values when I watch contemporary Doctor Who which continues the show’s humanitarian legacy. I feel that sense of wonder and possibility when I read Africanfuturism fiction by writers like Wole Talabi, who told me he prefers climate change sci-fi where, “The environment is not a victim of your actions, it is a person or a spirit to be respected and you just haven’t been doing that.” I’m heartened to see the boundless creativity of larping (live-action roleplay) and independent tabletop games, where players happily put themselves into challenging and even heart-wrenching situations to find solutions and forge alliances. Initiatives like the Golden Cobra Challenge foster inclusive, experimental larps, while game and rule systems like Powered by the Apocalypse offer a free, flexible foundation for creating a wider variety of tabletop adventures beyond Dungeons & Dragons.
Those values are part of human nature and like us, they can adapt to fit whatever shape the future takes.
Eric Molinsky is the creator and host of the Imaginary Worlds podcast. Eric spent over a decade working as a public radio reporter and producer, and he uses those skills to create a sound-rich podcast about science fiction, fantasy, and other genres of speculative fiction. Before creating Imaginary Worlds in 2014, Eric spent 10 years working primarily with the arts and culture show Studio 360 from PRI. He also produced and reported stories for Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WNYC and NPR, Marketplace, The New Yorker Radio Hour, 99% Invisible, Radio Diaries, KCRW's UnFictional and the audio drama podcast The Truth.