The end of the year is approaching all too quickly, and I’m pulling together a list of science fiction set in 2025 and published or released more than twenty years before that. The list for 2025 isn’t a particularly long one, but it starts with The Duplicate Man, an episode of The Outer Limits broadcast in December 1964.
The story is based pretty closely on a 1951 story by Clifford D. Simak, published in Galaxy Magazine as “Goodnight, Mr James”, but retitled “The Night of the Puudly” as the title story of one of his collections, and most recently republished in an anthology last year.
The title character has illegally smuggled an alien onto Earth, which then escapes; he creates a short-lived clone duplicate of himself to hunt it down and kill it, and then the two versions of Mr James are confronted with each other. I didn’t really understand why he needed to create a duplicate of himself to do the hunting, either in the story or in the TV adaptation. It would surely have been better to hire a hit-man or hit-woman. There’s a tremendous analysis of the episode here.
It’s not stated anywhere in the script (or in the original story) that the setting is 2025, but it seems to be fairly well established lore among Outer Limits fans, so I guess it must have been a detail in the plot summary sent out to published TV listings in 1964. We are told that the early period of space exploration was in the 1980s and 1990s, 30 years before, which fits a setting in the 2020s. The establishing scene is in a museum which was founded in 2011.
So what does this story tell us about 2025? 2025 in The Duplicate Man differs from 1964 in that humans have been exploring alien planets and bringing back aliens since the 1980s; there are video phones with rotary dials; there are futuristic-looking guns, cars and houses; and there is cloning, though that word isn’t used. However, relations between the sexes don’t seem to have moved on much – all the scientist characters are men, and the women are Mrs James, a government agency receptionist, and some tourists in the space museum at the beginning. (Having said that, there are no women at all in the original Simak story.)
One point to come back to – in both the Simak story and the TV version, the urgency of getting rid of the alien is driven by the fact that it is about to reproduce, and unleash dozens (Simak) or hundreds (TV script) of killer offspring on our planet. Reproductive politics will come up again as we look at other authors’ takes on 2025…
And one last thing – the monster mask in the TV series got recycled for the Star Trek pilot episode, The Cage, in which it is briefly seen imprisoned next to Captain Pike, with a few more feathers.
