As in previous years, I’ve searched for SF set in the year to come so that we will be forewarned of what lies in wait for us. (This has not always proved to be an accurate guide: cf 2020.) This is a relatively thin year, to be honest, but I have a dozen or so film, TV, books and a video game, all set in the year 2024. Here is my complete compilation:
I should add that I have a cutoff of twenty years earlier, so I’m not counting anything released or published since 2004 here. This does lead to a couple of gaps…
Most notoriously, Star Trek: The Next Generation predicted Irish reunification in 2024, in the episode “The High Ground”. The scene was cut when the story was first shown on British TV, and the whole episode was skipped when the series was first shown on Irish TV.
Anyway, chronologically the first is Beyond the Time Barrier, a 1960 film produced by and starring Robert Clarke, a USAF test pilot who discovers that he has flown into a dystopian future, the year 2024, where a cosmic plague has devastated humanity and the sterile remnants cower underground. Our hero is asked to breed with the only young woman who remains fertile. I will leave it to your imagination to guess what happens next.
In a 1964 episode of TV show The Outer Limits “The Invisible Enemy”, the first humans to land on Mars in 2021 mysteriously disappear; three years later, a rescue mission captained by Adam West (better known as Batman) comes to investigate and finds a breathable atmosphere and sand monsters.
Harlan Ellison’s notorious dystopia, A Boy and his Dog (novella 1969, film 1975) is definitely set in 2024 – the original novella says that it is 76 years after 1948, and the film bigs up the date in promotional posters, indeed 2024 is part of the title in some translations. Again our protagonist is invited to breed with one of the few remaining fertile women after the apocalypse; she does not get a happy ending.
Norman Macrae, the deputy chief editor of the Economist, published The 2024 Report: A Concise History of the Future, 1974-2024 in 1984. (And seems to have produced a revised edition called The 2025 Report the following year; see here.) He forecast the fall of the Berlin Wall and of Communism in the late 1980s, an a boom in technology leading to the withering away of the state and a new era of enlightened discourse. If only. (You can get it here, at a price.
Highlander II: The Quickening (1991) is set in 2024; yet another dystopia in which humanity has screwed up the atmosphere and our hero needs to put things right. It is the sequel to a much better film from five years earlier. As someone very wise once put it, there should have been only one!
Also from 1991, in Allen Steele’s novel Lunar Descent the workers on an industrial colony on the Moon go on strike to hit back at management. Like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but more genuinely left-wing. You can get it here.
And again from 1991, the anime Silent Möbius: The Motion Picture is mainly set in 2028 but starts with a flashback to 2024 where the policewoman hero first encounters the monster at the core of the plot.
Octavia E. Butler’s classic Parable of the Sower (1993) is, I’m afraid, yet another dystopia where society is collapsing due to climate change and growing inequality. Butler’s teenage protagonist revives her community through a new religion. The story starts in 2024. The graphic novel version won the Hugo in 2021. (You can get the novel here and the graphic version here.)
In 1995, Star Trek Deep Space Nine visited 2024 California in the two-part story “Past Tense”. It turns out that the time-slipped crew have arrived on the eve of historically notorious riots in a deeply divided society. (Incidentally although I’m enjoying Season 2 of Star Trek: Picard, also set in California in 2024, it fails my twenty-years-ago threshold.)
In 2001, the cartoonist Ted Hall published 2024, a graphic novel updating Orwell’s 1984. The economy is run by megacorporations that exploit ethnic tensions in trade wars; the protagonists are named Winston and Julia; news and history are easily revised digitally, and shopping and pornography substitute for social interaction and passion. (According to the review in Publishers Weekly.) You can get it here.
I promised a game, and here it is: Jet Set Radio Future, made by Sega for the Xbox in 2002, features kids with rocket-powered rolling skates zooming around Tokyo.
We’ve had Star Trek twice, and I’m glad to say that we can also have some Doctor Who. Last chronologically before my 20-year cutoff. The Eighth Doctor novel Emotional Chemistry by Simon A. Forward takes place in three timelines: 1812, the 21st century and the 51st century. The back cover makes it clear that the 21st century action is set in 2024, mostly in Russia. You can get it here (at a price).
Finally, and more optimistically, the protagonist of the 1999 film The Thirteenth Floor, having endured awful scenarios in virtual versions of 1999 and 1937, wakes up to discover that it’s 2024 and actually everything is OK.
Dystopias and more positive high-tech futures are finely balanced here – I count six of each, with maybe an extra dystopia if we are allowed to take the two versions of A Boy and his Dog separately. It could go either way, folks; let’s be careful this year!