The cost of water has gone up again. And I heard on the news today that more water peddlers are being killed. Peddlers sell water to squatters and the street poor—and to people who’ve managed to hold on to their homes, but not to pay their utility bills. Peddlers are being found with their throats cut and their money and their handtrucks stolen. Dad says water now costs several times as much as gasoline. But, except for arsonists and the rich, most people have given up buying gasoline. No one I know uses a gas-powered car, truck, or cycle. Vehicles like that are rusting in driveways and being cannibalized for metal and plastic.
I discovered to my surprise, after reading the Hugo-winning graphic adaptation of this classic novel in 2021, that I had not read the original version, though I had read the Nebula-winning sequel soon after it came out and again in 2009. It’s of special interest right now because the first part of the story is set this year, starting on 20 July 2024 (the 65th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing), though it runs through to 2027.
On the one hand it’s a grim narrative of the disintegration of society in an all too credible future, where the state no longer protects people against each other, climate change is out of control and the narrator’s safe home enclave becomes steadily less safe. There are some gruesome moments of psychological and physical horror, and the whole situation seems a lot more plausible now than it must have done in 1993 (which was the exact time that the Republican Party declared war on the Constitution).
At the same time the narrator, Lauren Olamina, is a symbol of hope, founding a new belief system that allows her and her found family, her tribe, to start rebuilding society for the future. The book ends on a note of optimism despite the horror. One can question how realistic it is that even the most gifted eighteen-year-old could start a successful religious movement for the long term, even (especially?) under such extreme circumstances, but great stories are often written about unlikely events. You can get it here.
Not surprisingly, an easy Bechdel pass, with the narrator and her stepmother discussing the stars in the first chapter.
This was my top unread sf book, my top unread book by a woman and my top unread book by a non-white author. Next on those piles respectively are Hard to Be a God, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky; The Virgin in the Garden, by A.S. Byatt; and Fevered Star, by Rebecca Roanhorse.
Even in retreat. Chased by the chuff and crack of a line of French muskets.
This is an Eighth Doctor novel which I read back in 2015, at a time when I was slacking on my bookblogging and didn’t get around to writing it up. I came back to it last month because part of it is set in the year 2024 in Russia, where the Doctor’s companion Fitz Kreiner finds himself isolated while the Doctor and the other companion Trix McMillan zoom off to the year 5000 and to 1812 respectively. To be honest there is little here to differentiate the Russia of 2024 from the Russia of 2002 when the book was written, and if it weren’t for the back cover explicitly mentioning 2024 you would tend to think it was set in or very soon after the year of publication. I’m afraid I was not terribly excited by the plot, with a McGuffin and a time-travelling entity looking for it, but there are some pleasing references to Magnus Greel from The Talons of Weng-Chiang. You can get it here.
Two strokes of lightning split the black night sky above Boston simultaneously. One hit somewhere in Dorchester, in the no-man’s-land where even the street gangs had fled from the thunderbolts and the cold, driving rain, taking shelter in the doorways of barricaded stores and housing projects; the other was its reflection, mirrored in the titanic glass wall of the Sony Tower, rising three hundred stories above the uptown streets, a black megalith that dwarfed the architectural Brahmins of yesteryear, the Hancock Building and the Pru.
This is the first novel by Allen Steele that I have read in full – I read the two sections of Coyote that were Hugo finalists, but never sat down to read the full thing. I confess that I got it purely because it is set in 2024, 33 years after the publication date of 1991. The world is not so different from the present day except that there is a functioning lunar industrial colony, churning out special components for Earth’s booming electronics industry. The colony is badly run, and our protagonist, a disgraced former astronaut with addiction problems, is sent to sort things out. He is joined by a tough female NASA security agent and a hacking genius who specialises in undetectable electronic crime. It’s rather a good romp, inevitably reminiscent of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but from a rather more obviously left-wing point of view (and I’m not saying that is a bad thing). You can get it here.
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!
Fools often think that they can get something for nothing. Unfortunately a large number of our politicians agreed and decided to make their fantasy come true with public money. They thought all that was required was to harness the infinite power of wind, water and plant life. A concept so simple you have to wonder why it had not been done before. But of course it had and many centuries ago at that. The first recognisable windmill was produced two thousand years ago by a Greek known as Heron the Engineer; water power is even more ancient and goes back to the sixth millennium BC and the first patent for wave power was filed by a father-and-son team in Paris in 1799. The history of tidal power goes back as far as 900 AD.
Robert Durward was a Scottish businessman who had made a fortune in pink gravel. He had firm political beliefs, including that the traditional UK political parties are running out of steam and failing to connect with citizens as once they did (incontrovertible) and that he had the answer to reshape society (more questionable). Fate threw us together for a while in 2017, and we met in person once and had a number of conversations by phone and email. Unexpectedly, he died early in 2018 and our association came to a end.
This brief book, published early in 2017 before I got to know him, is a projection of how British and indeed global society will, in the next seven years, inevitably overthrow the current institutions of government, especially the existence of political parties, and create a utopia of a new world order. I have to be honest: it’s not terribly good. Wells did it better in The World Set Free. I’ve argued with idealists on both the left and the right about the role of political parties in any governance system (whether or not they are democratic) and I tend to think of them as a cultural universal.
So I think 2024 in our timeline is unlikely to work out as Robert Durward predicted (and in fairness, he was offering a vision, not a road map). But you can get it here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Many Grains of Sand, by Liz Castro.
