Finally the rising journalist went and sounded the people on the two chief Folkestone papers and found the thing had just got to them. They were inclined to pretend they hadn’t heard of it, after the fashion of local papers when confronted by the abnormal, but the atmosphere of enterprise that surrounded the rising journalist woke them up. He perceived he had done so and that he had no time to lose. So while they engaged in inventing representatives to enquire, he went off and telephoned to the Daily Gunfire and the New Paper. When they answered he was positive and earnest. He staked his reputation — the reputation of a rising journalist!
A short satirical piece by Wells from 1902. His first twenty books were published between 1895 and 1912, and this was the only one that I had not yet read. A mermaid washes ashore between Folkestone and Hythe (weirdly enough, I spent two nights at Hythe last November), and the local Liberal candidate falls in love with her. There is much comedy of manners (though the book is only 100 pages long). You can get it here.
I suspect that Wells was reflecting on his own experience of his love life interfering with his political activities. Several of his earlier books (most notably The New Machiavelli) include elections, but it wasn’t until 1922 and 1923 that he put himself forward (for the London University constituency; he came third out of three candidates both times).
This was the shortest unread book that I acquired in 2019. Next on that pile is The Soul of a Bishop, also by Wells.
“Vero!” Simon shouted. “Vero!” He struggled helplessly in the gorse; stamped down for a foothold but found nothing; sank waist-deep in furze. The quaking earth shifted again, like coals settling in the fire, and sank slowly into the hill-side, sucking in a great wad of gorse. Stones and clods and hummocks of grass slid into the darkness. Simon saw the earth opening under him and flung out his right arm, seeking frantically for a handhold. Martin’s hand gripped his, tightened and held; Monica’s fingers clutched his wrist.
A sequel to the lovely Creed Country by the same author, following the adventures of Sarah’s (many) younger siblings and their friends as they explore the countryside around them in the snow, get to know a mysterious old lady, and produce a medieval Mystery Play in an old church. To be honest, the plot is a bit diffuse with an abundance of characters to follow, but they do each have a distinct voice and it portrays a more innocent time (the cusp of the 1970s) in rural Surrey (a concept that barely exists these days). You can get it here.
I also want to shout out the cover art by Elizabeth Grant, which I find striking and evocative.
She illustrated a lot of children’s books in the early 1970s – in my mind she is inseparable from the Puffins.
This 1977 painting of “A Bunker on an American Golf Course”, at Knightshayes Court in Devon, looks like it might be by her too.
I wish I could find out more about her, but there seem to be at least four living artists also named Elizabeth Grant, so it’s impossible to dig through the data.
Current Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read) Paddy Machiavelli: How to Get Ahead in Irish Politics, by John Drennan Killing Ground, by Steve Lyons Fifty Years On, by Malachi O’Doherty
Last books finished A Kind of Spark, by Elle McNicoll Doctor Who annual 2025, by Paul Lang The Passionate Friends, by H.G. Wells The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow The Hypothetical Gentleman, by Andy Diggle, Mark Buckingham, Brandon Seifert and Philip Bond Orbital, by Samantha Harvey I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman
Next books Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead, by Dale Smith The Soul of a Bishop, by H.G. Wells On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong
I’ve been really bad at tracking my Big Finish listening here, and one of my minor New Year’s resolutions is to do that a bit better. I actually listened to this trilogy mainly while doing Christmas shopping, and perhaps I was in a good mood, but I notice that I liked it more than a few of the other reviews I have glanced at. They all feature Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor, with no common companion across the three plays (though two Eighth Doctor companions pop up in the third). Here’s a trailer:
The first of these The Seas of Titan by Liz Myles, is a Sea Devils story with a difference in that it’s set on Titan, not Earth. It hits much the same beats as most other Silurian / Sea Devils stories, with the wrinkle that both humans and Sea Devils have been abandoned by the rest of their race who have moved on (or stayeed put). I really liked the change of setting and the consequent difference of pace.
BF tend to include a historical story in every trilogy, and this time it’s Lay Down Your Arms, by Lisa McMullin, set in a late Habsburg spa resort where aliens are infiltrating the convalescents. Some of the virtual architecture was a bit unbelievable (“bonkers”, as another reviewer put it), but Kate Sissons as Betha Kinzky, the companion of the hour, is tremendous with Eccleston, and there is a great sting in the tail as we discover what she did with the rest of her life. (I at least had heard of her, under her married name.)
But my breath was taken away by Flatpack, by John Dorney, the third of the trilogy. The Doctor arrives in a mysterious self-assembly furniture superstore, and encounters Liv Chenka (Nicola Walker) and Tania Bell (Rebecca Root), who featured as companions of the Eighth Doctor in the extensive (perhaps overextended) saga Stranded which I listened to last year (and never got around to writing up). It becomes clear, as the entertaining script develops, that the secret controllers of the furniture store are up to no good – but I totally missed the clues as to who they actually turn out to be, a tremendous plot twist which I don’t think I’ve seen before in any Doctor Who story.
The first Big Finish stories with the Ninth Doctor were a little uneasy, as if the star and the production team were still sizing each other up. But now they seem to have properly got into their stride, and I highly recommend getting this here.
Opening of the third play (the long version of Thirst):
The curtain goes up on the bar. It is after hours. Light from a distant street-lamp shines faintly on the window The bar is lit (very badly.) by two candles which are set on the counter, one of them stuck in a bottle. The publican, MR. C., who is suitably fat and prosperous in appearance, is leaning over the centre of the counter talking to PETER, who is sitting on a stool side-face to the audience. JEM, who is in the nature of a hanger-on, is away in a gloomy corner where he can barely be discerned. Both customers are drinking pints; the publican has a small whiskey. The curtain has gone up in the middle of a conversation between PETER and the publican.
MR. C.: (Dramatically.) And do you know why? (There is a pause.) Do you know why? PETER: Begor, Mr Coulahan, I couldn’t tell you. MR. C.: (Loudly.) Because he’s no good, that’s why. He’s no bloody good!
(He finishes his drink in one gulp, turns to the shelves for the whiskey bottle and noisily fills himself another. As the talk proceeds he is occupied with pulling two further stouts to fill up the customers’ glasses PETER smokes and bends his head reflectively. JEM is silent save for drinking noises. He shows his face for a moment in the gloom by lighting a cigarette.)
This is a collection of seven stage plays and seven TV plays by Flann O’Brien / Myles na gCopaleen, some of which were performed in his lifetime and some of which were not. I bought it in the run-up to the 2019 Dublin Worldcon, partly to see if Faustus Kelly, the first of the plays, was worthy of a Retro Hugo nomination, and partly to prep for a panel on Flann O’Brien that I knew I’d be doing at the convention. But I had not previously sat down and read it from cover to cover.
Some of these pieces are very slight, but some are very interesting. The 1943 play Faustus Kelly brings the Devil to the Irish Midlands to interfere in local politics. He finds it so awful that he returns to Hell. It’s interesting that the politician protagonist is depicted very clearly as living with a woman who he is not married to – and the local political activists take it in their stride. This is fifty years before Bertie Ahern became Taoiseach.
Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green is adaptation of The Insect Play by Karel Čapek (best known as the inventor of the word ‘robot’ in his play R.U.R.) and his brother Josef. Like Faustus Kelly, it was performed at the Gate Theatre in 1943. Where the Čapeks’ first scene features butterflies as mindless and vain literary salon types, writing poetry to each other, O’Brien makes the characters here bees representing the posh Anglo-Irish elite, engaged in idle self-destruction. The two other scenes are less changed. In the second scene, the Čapeks’ dung-beetles are solid middle-class citizens saving for retirement; O’Brien makes Mr Beetle specifically a Dublin civil servant. And the militarist, proudly engineering ants in the last scene are Ulster ants in O’Brien’s adaptation. The satire is mean and doesn’t always land right for the twenty-first century reader, but it must have been a great production.
The other one that struck me was The Dead Spit of Kelly, about a taxidermist’s assistant who murders his boss and then disguises himself in his boss’s skin, with surreal consequences. It was shown on RTE in 1962. A film version starring Colin Morgan and Jason Isaacs was announce in 2021 but does not seem to have got off the drawing board.
The rest are shorter pieces, and some of them are rather slight (there’s a dire skit about an airplane trip from Dublin to London with an annoying English passenger). But I am glad to have read them. You can get it here.
This was the unread book that had lasted longest in my non-genre pile (though all three of the pieces that I mention above actually have strong fantasy elements). Next on that pile is, er, Black Mountain by Gerry Adams. But I acquired it only in 2021, so I’m pausing that cycle for now until I have cleared the remainder of my 2019 and 2020 books. (I have read all of the non-genre books that I acquired in 2020, finishing with Summer by Ali Smith.)
When I first watched this 1964 story in 2006, I wrote:
This was the last of the First Doctor stories that I felt I must Get Hold Of. I think you have to allow for the fact that it is mid-1960s drama to take into account the rather slow pacing. I liked it all the same; a real attempt to get into the spirit of the historical period, with some difficult dilemmas for the time-travellers – Barbara determined to abolish human sacrifice, but ultimately fails; and the Doctor has someone fall in love with him for the first time (but not, of course the last) in his on-screen adventures. Cameca’s helping them to escape in the end, even though she knows she will never see them again, was as touching as Barbara’s acceptance of her inability to change history. A minor gem, I would say.
When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch in 2009, I wrote:
The Aztecs is very good, but doesn’t quite rise to greatness. There are some great bits – Barbara struggling with the consequences of her divinity, the Doctor’s romance with Cameca, the Doctor and Barbara arguing about changing history. (It should be added that Lucarotti did some good female characters – Barbara is at her best here, and don’t forget Cameca, Ping-Cho and Anne Chaplet.) But I find Tlotoxl a little too pantomimey as a villain, and Ian just biffs Aztecs about, and gets condemned to death again, while Carole Ann Ford is on holiday. Everyone does it with great conviction, and you barely notice that it’s all done in a hot studio with a painted backdrop. And we end with another cliff-hanger into the next story, though our heroes have had enough time to change clothes.
This time around, a little wiser to the constraints of 1960s television, I am amazed at how well the director and cast managed to convey a grand sweeping city and civilization in four cramped studio sets. Also Margot van der Burgh is very impressive as Cameca, a mostly quiet but crucial role. You can get it here.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of the novelisation is:
The Aztecs they passed on the way to the barracks bowed respectfully to Tlotoxl, but Ian sensed they were afraid of the High Priest.
I was disappointed by Lucarotti’s novelisation of The Massacre, which stuck much more closely to his original script than the show as broadcast. Here again he has added bits and pieces which presumably were in his original concept, and I was again disappointed, but for a different reason: the narration is strangely flat, and you really miss the performances of the actors breathing life into Lucarotti’s lines back in 1964. One cannot help but feel that the production team on the whole did Lucarotti a favour by editing his material. Also he has a really annoying habit of mixing indirect speech with direct speech, which reads like a desperate attempt to make a novel out of a TV script.
Reading the book again very soon after rewatching the story, there are a few important differences included to smoothe out the plot; but I stand by my complaint about the jerky switches from indirect to direct speech. You can get it here.
Doris V. Sutherland’s Black Archive on the story has four chapters, a substantial conclusion and an interesting appendix. The first chapter, ‘Building the Pyramid’, looks at The Aztecs in the context of the 1960s historical stories of Doctor Who, as a showcase for Jacqueline Hill as Barbara, and as a reflection on the effects of time travel, pointing out how new all of this was for Doctor Who at the time.
The second chapter, ‘Not One Line? The Historical Accuracy of The Aztecs’ goes in detail, perhaps a bit too much detail, on whether or not the story is a good description of the real Aztec culture. Though there are a couple of good observations, eg “it is hard to miss the awkward results of the script’s reluctance to mention the Aztec deities by name. It appears that such monikers as Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli were deemed insufficiently pronounceable for a production in which retakes were to be avoided for budget reasons.”
The third and longest chapter, ‘Narratives of Conquest’, looks at where the ideas for the story really came from. Its second paragraph is:
The Doctor Who Discontinuity Guide by Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping lists, as an influence on the serial, The Royal Hunt of the Sun², a play by Peter Shaffer that depicted Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Incas and was performed in the same year as The Aztecs³. However, the dates here do not quite match up: as Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood point out, the play was originally performed in mid-February, while Lucarotti has stated that he first discussed the possibility of an Aztec-themed story during the filming of Marco Polo, which wrapped up on 17 February⁴. [Comment: actually that looks to me like a very good match-up of the dates!] ² Cornell, Day and Topping, Discontinuity Guide, loc 370. ³ And was adapted into a movie in 1969, starring Robert Shaw and Christopher Plummer. ⁴ Miles, Lawrence and Tat Wood, About Time: The Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who, 1963-1966, Seasons 1 to 3, p70.
Sutherland considers the 1947 film Captain from Castile and G.A. Henty before swinging again into the question of historical detail, examining very closely the extent of human sacrifice among the Aztecs and, crucially, whether or not it made much difference to the brutality of the Spanish conquest, concluding that it didn’t. I somewhat parted company with the writer here; I think that it doesn’t matter all that much that the story is not based on perfect historical knowledge.
The fourth chapter, ‘What Does The Aztecs Have to Say?’, starts by recounting critical opinion of the story but then swings back into the question of colonialism, pointing out that the barbarism of Spanish colonialism, as perceived in English culture, is a really crucial element of understanding what was going on. How very different, perhaps we are meant to think, to enlightened British colonialism! I think there is actually a bit more that could have been looked at here, in terms of 1960s British perceptions of the Franco regime. Her ultimate judgement is that the message of The Aztecs on colonialism is confused, rather than definitively pro or anti.
I have to take issue with the final section of Chapter 4, which states that “Only with the first Chibnall / Whittaker season, which aired in 2018, did the series hire its first non-white writers.” Glen McCoy, who wrote the 1985 story Timelash, is Anglo-Indian – I have checked this with him personally.
The conclusion makes the point that The Aztecs is quite different from most Doctor Who stories, while still being similar enough to be recognisable and sound enough to remain watchable decades later.
An appendix looks at the differences in the novelisation, flagging up in particular a more overtly Christian agenda, and then briefly looks at Child of the Sun God, an episode of the Andersons’ Joe 90 also written by Lucarotti with striking similarities (a lost Amazonian tribe is striking down world statesmen; Joe 90 must infiltrate them, pass himself off as a white god and save the day), but which is much less memorable.
I confess to not being completely satisfied with this particular Black Archive. Researching the factual basis of a particular story takes us quickly to the point where the commentator can show off the superiority of their knowledge to the original writer. I preferred the discussions of ideology and of Lucarotti’s use of his sources, whatever they were. But you can get it here.
‘Hmm …’ the Doctor mused as his eyes passed over the houses surrounding him. ‘Why have a plant pot without any plants?’
A Fifteenth Doctor book which is yet another story of rebels against the system, with world-building so complex that I am afraid I got lost in it, and loads of characters who barely have time to establish themselves before the book ends (or they get killed). Yes, it’s an important anti-colonial narrative; yes, there are a lot of Doctor Who stories that have this theme; but most of them are better executed. Heart in the right place, perhaps needed twice as much space (or substantial editing). You can get it here.
See here for methodology. Back when I started this project, I was simply recording the top eight books tagged as being in each country by users of on Goodreads and LibraryThing, and then recording which didn’t really qualify. I have switched now to a system where I disqualify the relevant books before constructing my league table, so I’m going back to the Philippines with an updated table.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Ghost Soldiers
Hampton Sides
37,671
2,839
Trash
Andy Mulligan
14,321
1,080
Patron Saints of Nothing
Randy Ribay
18,192
667
In the Presence of my Enemies
Gracia Burnham
7,873
1,365
The Tesseract
Alex Garland
6,891
1,259
Noli Me Tángere
José Rizal
8,268
724
We Band of Angels
Elizabeth M. Norman
4,555
567
El Filibusterismo
José Rizal
6,288
376
I disqualified eight books, which is a lot, though not as many as with Bangladesh last week. A lot of GR and LT users use the “philippines” tag for books that are about Filipino migrants to the USA or elsewhere, or about the Second World War in the Pacific, or about US colonial policy more generally.
Specifically, the top book most often tagged “Philippines” on both Goodreads and LibraryThing is Neal Stephenson’s epic Cryptonomicon. I am of course disqualifying it as considerably less than half of the 900+ pages are set in the country. Arsenic and Adobo, by Mia P. Manansala, and The Farm, by Joanne Ramos, are set in the USA. American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, by William Manchester, covers the man’s entire career. How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, by Daniel Immerwahr, includes the Philippines as the most egregious case of US colonialism.
Avenue of Mysteries, by John Irving, takes its protagonist to the Philippines, though for less than half of the book. The same appears to be true for the protagonists of Falling Together, by Marisa de los Santos. Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, by Jose Antonio Vargas, is precisely about the immigrant experience in the USA. The Imperial Cruise, by James Bradley, is set on the SS Manchuria in 1905, and while it did visit the Philippines, that was just one of the stops.
So, of those I have allowed onto the list, three are about Americans being held prisoner in the Philippines, including the overall winner, Ghost Soldiers (the other two are In the Presence of my Enemies and We Band of Angels). Trash isn’t explicitly set in Manila, but everyone assumes that it is. Patron Saints of Nothing starts in the USA but I get the impression that more than half of it is set in the Philippines. The Tesseract is very definitely set in today’s Manila, and Noli Me Tángere and El Filibusterismo are nineteenth century classics of Filipino literature.
Next in this sequence I will revisit Ethiopia, and then back to my regular sequence with Argentina.
The truth is, there are plenty of negative sentiments all around and within us – anger, fear, discontent, distrust, sadness, suspicion, constant self-doubt … but perhaps more than anything, an ongoing apprehension. An existential angst. All these emotions are very much part of our lives now. Even digital spaces have become primarily emotional spaces.The posts that go viral or the videos that are watched most widely are freighted with emotions. What is equally significant is how this creates a tendency, a habit of mind, that perpetuates itself through space and time. In a study conducted by the Institute for Social Research scholars have found that ‘when exposed to less positive news, people posted less positive comments and more negative ones. When exposed to less negative posts, the opposite pattern occurred.’* * ‘Anger, Fear and Echo Chambers: The Emotional Basis for Online Behavior’, D. Wollebaek, R. Karlsen, K. Steen-Johnsen, B. Enjolras (April 2019) [NB – I see online versions of the book where the chapter division is very different to my printed edition.]
A short book, written in the wake of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, arguing for optimism and effort despite the depressing state of the world. I read it a couple of weeks ago, in the course of having a long and decompressing bath after I got back from a trip to Georgia, and it really helped my mood.
Shafak briefly and compellingly discusses the problems of anxiety and anger, the need and duty to tell ourselves and each other better stories, the importance of empathy and compassion, and the power of conscious optimism. It is peppered with personal anecdotes and observations, but not to the point that these distract from the core message. She also weaves in a few powerful quotations from others, including Martin Luther King’s “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” A short text that gave me a lot to think about. You can get it here.
Though familiar themes crop up everywhere, ancient tithing customs were particular to each parish. Today they read like magic potions: toad under cold stone, days and nights has forty-one, could well be the vicar’s due at Lammastide. As well as the joy of otherness and unfamiliar words to justify time spent with tithe records, they are also especially instructive for anyone chasing old stories. They challenge us to unravel them, to reveal lost ways of making sense of the world and to shed light on the long-forgotten machinations of the stock characters of village life: impecunious parsons, resentful husbandmen and bombastic squires.
A tremendously charming book about one obscure local legend in Hertfordshire, the story of Piers Shonks who slew a dragon hiding under an ancient yew tree in Brent Pelham, near Stansted Airport. Hadley goes into impressive detail about the origin of the legend, the meanings of dragons and yew trees, and Shonks’ unusual burial in the wall of the local church, and then into the limited but significant documentation of the life of a fourteenth-century Piers Shonks who lived in the right place.
The evidence doesn’t all point the same way, let alone hang together, but the point is not the truth or otherwise of the dragon myth, it’s the story of exploring the myth and seeing where that takes you; and it’s a great trip through the archives and lore of England, Hertfordshire in particular. You can get it here.
I learned about this not from Ron but from his wife, Matrice.
A follow-up to her earlier autobiography, this is much more of a self-help book drawing on lessons learned from Michelle Obama’s family, her friends, her career and her experience of being First Lady for eight years. Most of us can relate to all but the last of these. It’s a very affirming message of self-help, self-confidence and compassion, which rather restores one’s faith in humanity. I am not in the audience that the book is primarily aimed at, but I found a lot to like and admire here, and it actually succeeded in cheering me up a bit about the state of the world. You can get it here.
An interesting thought from a parallel universe: a POLITICO journalist interviewing two senior Trump campaign managers last month asked if they had investigated popular support for alternative candidates to President Biden, other than Vice-President Harris, to see what would happen if he were replaced on the ballot.
Trump adviser: Yeah, we tested them all. POLITICO: Who was the strongest? Trump adviser: Strangely enough, Michelle Obama.
This was the top book on my unread pile that was non-fiction, by a woman, and acquired in 2023. Next on those stacks respectively are The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy; I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman; and A History of the Bible, by John Barton.
This is the sixth time that I have compiled a list of science fiction’s predictions for the year ahead. I cover TV, films, books, comics and games set in 2025, but I only look at those that are more than twenty years old – so for instance this year I am skipping Vernor Vinge’s award-winning 2006 novel Rainbow’s End. That still leaves plenty to choose from.
Dystopia I: environmental catastrophe
I’m sorry to say that quite a lot of the science fiction set in 2025 has a dystopian theme, though few are quite as bleak as the 1986 filmFuture Hunters, starring Robert Patrick and Linda Carroll. Here’s its opening scene:
The film only spends about twenty minutes in the future before timewarping back to 1986, where the protagonists must find the Spear of Destiny by defeating its Amazon warrior guards in alliance with a tribe of midgets. This apparently will avert the ecological disaster that would otherwise destroy society.
It’s a common theme. (Ecological disaster, that is.) T. Coraghessan Boyle’s 2000 novel A Friend of the Earth, which features a disturbing dead frog on the cover, alternates timelines between the early 1990s when things started to go wrong, and 2025 when the protagonist starts to put his life back together (though it is too late to avoid environmental catastrophe).
Caroline MacDonald’s 1992 YA novel, The Lake at the End of the World, ends with two groups of devastated survivors of the climate apocalypse coming together to ring in the new year of 2025.
And of course in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, part of which is set in 2025, environmental catastrophe is piled on top of political catastrophe and societal breakdown.
Dystopia II: violent sport
Not all of the 2025 dystopias involve environmental catastrophe. Violent games are another recurrent theme. Most famously, in the best known book set in 2025 that I can identify, the protagonist of Stephen King’s 1982 novel The Running Man is given 30 days to escape a televised manhunt, screened as a distraction from the horrible dystopian reality of American society. (The 1987 film with Arnold Schwarzenegger is set a few years earlier.)
Televised violent sport is also central to two films set in 2025. The 1983 film Endgame (Bronx lotta finale), starring Al Cliver and Laura Gemser, sees our protagonists in televised combat through the streets of a devastated future New York, before escaping to the nearby desert for a final showdown the bad guys.
And in the 1988 film Futuresport, starring Dean Cain, Vanessa Williams, and Wesley Snipes, the American protagonists of the massively popular game known as, er, Futuresport, play a high-stakes match against their Asian opponents, with the sovereignty of Hawaii as the prize.
And while we’re on the theme of fictional violent games, in the three actual video games that I have found which are set in 2025 you have to shoot your way out of trouble.
In the 1994 Impossible Mission 2025 for the Amiga (remake of a 1984 Commodore 64 game, Impossible Mission, which wasn’t set in any particular year), you also have to put together the pieces of a puzzle to defeat the evil scientist and his robots.
In the 2000 Japanese game for Dreamcast, Undercover AD2025 Kei, you play a policewoman avenging her husband on the criminals who killed him.
And in the 2005 multi-platform game F.E.A.R. First Encounter Assault Recon, you play a special operative with lots of shooty bangy things, called in to deal with a psychic mutant capable of wreaking havoc on society.
Dystopia III: 334
Sometimes a dystopia is a dystopia because life in general is just shit. This is the case for the wide range of characters in Thomas M. Disch’s 334, who sprawl across the years between 2021 and 2026, with one and a half of the six stories in the book explicitly set in 2025 and the whole book set in and around 334 East 11th Street in New York. Economic collapse and state intrusion have made reproductive rights a key issue in Disch’s future, with some protagonists desperate to conceive and others desperate to avoid the consequences.
Outer space and reproduction
The three stories set in 2025 that feature space exploration also both feature reproduction as a sub-theme. The alien Megasoid which escapes its zoo in the 1964 Outer Limits episode, The Duplicate Man, wishes only to swamp the planet earth with its offspring. (Though the main theme of the episode is the creation of a duplicate of the protagonist to hunt it down.)
And, soon after arriving in a huge artificial structure in orbit around Saturn, the female protagonists of John Varley’s 1979 novel Titandiscover that they are all pregnant. (And the main theme of the book is the quest for the alien intelligence responsible.)
Hatching and despatching is also a core theme of the short 2005 Japanese film, Negadon: The Monster from Mars – Negadon itself is brought to Earth as an egg, from which the monster then emerges; meanwhile the scientist who tracks it down is coming to terms with the fact that his daughter died when his killer robot malfunctioned.
How we get to dystopia
Skip to the next section if you don’t want to be spoilered for a comic published in 2003.
In Superman & Batman Generations 3: The 21st Century!: Century 21: Doomsday Minus One, by John Byrne, the high-tech 2025 of most of the story is devastated on the last page by an anti-technology bomb detonated by Lex Luthor, which reduces society to pre-industrial life.
Kids save the day
A couple more high-tech future series feature bright and talented kids who defeat the bad guys. The teens who constitute Tom Clancy’s Net Force Explorers, in a series of eighteen books published between 1998 and 2002 (none of which was written by Tom Clancy), use their cyber skills to Fight Crime.
And the thirty-eight episodes of 2005 TV series Power Rangers S.P.D. see yet another new set of Power Rangers defending Earth against Emperor Gruumm and his Troobian Empire.
Timey-wimey
I end this survey with three quite different gonzo takes on 2025. In the 2003 film Timecop 2: The Berlin Decision, Jason Scott Lee as the protagonist must try and prevent the villain, played by Thomas Ian Griffith, from going back to 1940 and killing Hitler. (What would be so bad about that?)
In S.M. Stirling’s error-strewn 2002 novel The Peshawar Lancers, the world is still recovering from the devastating meteor impacts of the 1870s which destroyed Europe, and our gallant British heroes with their plucky Indian allies fight off the devil-worshipping Russians.
And from 1986, La Femme piège (The Woman Trap), the middle volume of Enki Bilal’s Nikopol Trilogy, features a time-warping fax machine, ancient Egyptian gods, a sercret space mission, mind-altering drugs and sex and violence in Paris and Berlin. What more could you want for 2025?
