Published as La Foire aux immortels in 1980, this is set in a near-future Paris which is basically independent, France having collapsed as a state, and run by the fascist mayor Choublanc (Bunglieri in my translation) who is now facing re-election. The suburbs are decaying and run by local gangs. Everyone reads their own preferred news bulletins and information is therefore politically fragmented – an accurate anticipation in some ways.
Less accurately (probably – but who knows?), a giant floating pyramid inhabited by the gods of ancient Egypt has materialised over central Paris, and won’t go away unless supplied with fuel. Meanwhile Alcide Nikopol, a former astronaut who has spent thirty years frozen in suspended animation in orbit, returns to the city. His leg breaks off but is repaired in a rush job by the Horus, who allies with him against his fellow deities to shake up the politics of Paris in 2023.
It’s political and passionate, and fits in with the other lefty French-language 1980s comics which I read a few years back, Les Chroniques du Fin du Siècle by Santi-Bucquoy (Autonomes, Mourir à Creys-Malville, Chooz). It’s less ideological, but similar in the sense of the corruption and decay of the ruling classes, and the need for revolutionary action to bring about a better state of affairs. And the art is riveting.
Though also worth noting that the ice hockey team from Bratislava all speak Russian and their uniforms carry the initials ЧССР – not only did Czechoslovakia stay together in this version of 2023, it was also apparently annexed by the Soviet Union, which is still going strong. Bilal’s mother was Czech, so he knows perfectly well that Russian is not spoken much in Bratislava, nor is the Cyrillic alphabet used much there. (There would have been more of it in 1980 than now, but that’s not saying a lot.)
The second part is set in 2025, but I found reading it that the third part is set in 2034. So it’s only The Woman Trap (La Femme Piège) that concerns my 2025 project. It introduces the iconic character of Jill Bioskop, who is much more interesting than either Nikopol or his son (who looks conveniently identical to him). The art is great but the plot kinda weird, as Jill encounters various men, including the god Horus and the two Nikopols, and finds a fax machine that sends her reports back in time to 1993. (It’s difficult to judge whether a time-bending fax machine is less or more realistic than a fax machine that actually still works in 2024.)
The third part, Cold Equator (Froid Équateur), rather lost me; it’s mostly set in an African city under the rules of the sinister KKDZO, Nikopol gets into a tremendously violent chess-boxing match, and a new woman character, Yéléna the geneticist, forms a rather unexplained connection with Jill. This seems to be all about Stuff Happening with not much clue as to why. Maybe I was just tired.
One of the Peshawar Club’s discreet manservants had slipped the calling card under the door. As King read, he fended off the soft rounded warmth that pressed to his back, and the hands that reached teasingly around his body and tried to undo the bath towel wrapped about his waist.
Warning: this is a long piece, and a lot of it is pedantic whining.
This is the last of the science fiction novels that I found set in 2025 (and published before 2005), though I have a graphic novel coming up still. It’s also the longest of them, and the one in which 2025 has diverged the most from our own history. In this timeline, Europe and North America were devastated by meteorites in 1878, and the British Empire has resettled in India, with the royal family adopting a syncretic version of Anglicanism and Hinduism (Islam is a religion of the provinces and fringes) and ruling a polity anchored by South Africa at one end and Australia at the other. They are on friendly terms with France/Algeria, where the Napoleonic dynasty has resumed power, and threatened by the Russians, who have become devil-worshippers and cannibals based in Central Asia. China and Japan have united and are distantly threatening. Technology has developed to roughly steampunk level rather than anything more sophisticated.
Our heroes, a happy band of protagonists including the heirs to both the British and French empires (the latter is meant to be a surprise but it’s signalled pretty much from the start), with a diverse crew of warriors and a magically talented Russian defector, are battling to prevent the Russians taking over which would obviously be a Bad Thing. Starts with a fridging, then lots of steampunky combat and action, finishing with several perilous passages on an airship over Afghanistan, in the spirit of Kipling and Flashman. It’s an alternate world where the ruling classes happily bicker about who gets to rule, and where men are real men and allow women to be intellectuals too if they want. The obvious three couples all get together at the end. (Also, the Peshawar Lancers of the title are barely in the story at all.)
It’s all meant to be great fun, but several things really annoyed me about this novel. Stirling is determined to show off to us how much research he has done; but a little learning can be a dangerous thing. In Chapter 2, we have the following passage:
The younger man whispered to his companion in Bengali: “How can we trust this cow-murdering winebibber, my teacher? Even for a Muslim and outcaste, he is vile.”
The older man flicked a look at Ignatieff’s face to make sure he hadn’t understood—Bengali and Hindi were closely related—and the Okhrana agent beamed uncomprehending friendship.
He spoke both languages perfectly, of course.
Bengali and Hindi are not closely related. They are from different branches of the Indo-Aryan language group, Hindi from the Central subgroup and Bengali from the Eastern. In these enlightened days, you can actually ask an online translation engine to give you Bengali and Hindi versions of the phrase “How can we trust this cow-murdering winebibber, my teacher? Even for a Muslim and outcaste, he is vile.” The results are completely different:
Bengali
Hindi
আমরা কিভাবে এই গো-হত্যাকারী ওয়াইনবিবারকে বিশ্বাস করব, আমার শিক্ষক? এমনকি একজন মুসলিম ও বহিরাগতদের জন্যও সে জঘন্য।
इस गौ-हत्यारे शराबी पर हम कैसे भरोसा कर सकते हैं, मेरे गुरु? एक मुसलमान और बहिष्कृत व्यक्ति के लिए भी वह नीच है।
Is gau-hatyaare sharaabee par ham kaise bharosa kar sakate hain, mere guru? Ek musalamaan aur bahishkrt vyakti ke lie bhee vah neech hai.
There is some similarity between the words for “cow-killer”, “gō-hatyākārī” in Bengali and “gau-hatyaare” in Hindi, and also between the words for “Muslim”, “musalima” in Bengali and “musalamaan” in Hindi, which perhaps is an indication that you shouldn’t mutter insults in a language that you’re not sure your interlocutor doesn’t understand. But otherwise, you’re probably safe using Bengali in Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, which is where this scene is set.
Stirling may have got confused between Bengali and Urdu, the languages of the former East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and West Pakistan (now just Pakistan) respectively. Urdu is very similar to Hindi, to the point that ‘closely related’ may not convey the relationship strongly enough. However his fictional Angrezi Raj seems to have lost most of its Urdu speakers.
And these languages are not obscure – Hindi and Bengali have the fourth and fifth most native speakers in the world, after Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and English. I can’t imagine anyone writing, for instance, “The older man flicked a look at Sanchez’s face to make sure he hadn’t understood—Spanish and English are closely related.”
One can make the excuse for Stirling that online translation services were not available when he was writing the book. But encyclopedias certainly were, and you will find no encyclopedia that gives you reason to think that Bengali and Hindi are mutually intelligible. It’s fairly clear that he did not offer the draft for review to anyone with actual first-hand knowledge of Indian languages.
On another point, my eyebrows rose sharply in Chapter 23, when “Cassandra started wolfing down a fiery chicken Marsala”. No she didn’t. Marsala sauce, with an ‘r’, is made with the sweet wine of the same name and is not ‘fiery’. Masala, with no ‘r’, is a general term for an Indian spice mix, but usually not an especially hot one. If it is hot, its name is usually qualified with a particular set of ingredients, a ‘vindaloo masala‘ for instance.
And another thing: it’s a pet peeve of mine with other writers too, but the treatment of Russian is very inconsistent. Пожалуйста, “please”, is given as “pajalsta”, and Спасибо, “thank you” as “spacebo”; if I were being phonetic, I’d use “pazhal’sta” and “spasiba” to convey how they are actually pronounced by real Russian speakers, but usually in English writers use the standard transliterations, “pozhaluysta” and “spasibo”, even though they are a bit misleading. Yet at other points Stirling does use the standard transliteration, for example in Chapter 10 where we have the exchange “Govorite-li vy po-russki?” / “Da, govoryu. Kto vy takoy?” – “Do you speak Russian?” / “Yes, I do. And who are you?” If we were being phonetic, the first two vowels in говорите and говорю sound much more like short ‘a’ than short ‘o’, and the exchange is rather stilted anyway – “Vy govorite po-russki?” / “Da, a vy kto?” would be much more idiomatic. Though we are told it is the “High Formal mode” of Russian, for what that’s worth.
Incidentally the Russian-speaker is wearing a burqua rather than a burqa, and the military caste of India are the Kyashtria rather than the Kshatriya. Again, anyone who actually knows anything about Asian cultures will pick these up immediately.
These things do matter. If you are writing about other cultures, especially if you are writing in English about formerly colonised cultures in an alternate history where they have stayed colonised, it is important to show respect by getting at least basic language and cookery facts right.
Sorry to whine. Other readers, better informed on India than I am, have commented on other mistakes in the book, but those were the ones that jumped out at me.
I know that this book is beloved by many readers, but I’m afraid that I am not among them. You can get it here.
I have been trying to go through the science fiction set in 2025 in chronological order of publication / release, but somehow missed this 1986 film and have circled back to it.
This is definitely one of those films that is in the so-bad-it’s-good category. Only the first ten minutes is actually set in 2025, which is (as has depressingly often been the case on screen and page) a devastated post-apocalyptic wilderness. Then the guy who looks like he is going to be the protagonist grabs the Spear of Longinus, which pierced the body of the crucified Christ, and is zoinked back to the present day (ie 1986) where he is fatally wounded, and with his dying breath charges a young couple, played by Robert Patrick and Linda Carol, with the quest of uniting the spearhead with its hidden, long-sundered shaft, and therefore (by a mechanism that is never made clear) preventing the end of civilisation.
Robert Patrick is pretty wooden in Terminator 2, which was made five years later, and he’s pretty wooden here. But his co-star Linda Carol, supposedly still a teenager at the time and with only the lead role in Reform School Girls under her belt, steals the show with action and commitment; she gets a lot of the combat scenes despite wearing an impractical dress, and also gets most of the (few) good lines, as the two of them battle Nazis, martial artists, midgets and finally Amazon warriors to fulfil their quest. (Actually in fairness the midgets turn out to be on their side.) Everything has been thrown in here, quite unapologetically. You can’t quite decide whether to give it 3 out of 10 for effect, or 9 out of 10 for effort.
How am I feeling? Moist. Moist in the tear ducts and gonads, swelled up like a lungfish that’s been buried in the sand through a long desiccated summer till the day the sky breaks apart and the world goes wet again. The smell of coffee is taking me back—I don’t drink it myself anymore, too expensive and it raises hell with my stomach—and I feel myself slipping so far into the past I’m in danger of disappearing without making a ripple. She’s snoring. I can hear it—no delicate insuck and outhale, but a real venting of the airways, a noise as true in its way as anything Lily could work up. The rain slaps its broad hand on the roof, something that wasn’t tied down by somebody somewhere hits the wall just above the window, the world shudders, Andrea sleeps. It’s a moment.
A novel from 2000, this is another environmental crisis dystopia, set in two timelines; 1989 through to the mid 1990s, when it all goes wrong, and 2025-26, when our protagonist starts to pick up the emotional pieces again (though the world is still catastrophically damaged). I found it very well done – the protagonist’s ex-wife comes back to him in the first 2025 section, and the history of their relationship, and the fate of his daughter from a previous marriage, all play out against the damage being done to the natural world by humanity, both directly through logging and indirectly through climate change. A lot of my 2025 novels have been very depressing, and this is too, but I Iike it the most of any of them.
The dead frog on the cover was rather disturbing to see every time I opened the book on Kindle though.
This is another in my run of rather forgettable films with a 2025 setting – at least, the start and end and several bits in the middle are set in 2025, though you’ll have picked up from the title that there is a lot of time travel in it. Here’s a trailer.
This is very skippable. Jason Scott Lee, best known for playing Bruce Lee in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, is a time agent trying to prevent a rival time agent from changing history by, among other things, killing Hitler in 1940. (What would be so bad about that?) The plot is confused, the acting uninspired and the fight scenes done better elsewhere. Not especially recommended.
Another film set in 2025, and another 2025 story set around a ridiculously violent reality game, in this case called Futuresport. It has been invented to resolve gang violence by getting them to play Futuresport against each other instead. The top American team is led by a guy who looks like Superman, because he is played by Dean Cain. The top Asian team challenges the American to a match to decide who owns Hawaii, because Hawaiian terrorists have been blowing things up. It is exactly as stupid as I make it sound. You’ll never guess who wins in the end.
In its favour, there is one half-decent sex scene, right at the beginning to make you keep watching in hope that there is another, and the violence is not as gruesome as, say, Endgame / Bronx Lotta Finale. But the game itself is rather dull, which doesn’t help.
There was lots of time for Matt to do what he intended and then get on to his homework.
A YA novel, the first in a sequence related to the series of Net Force novels (and TV movie) by Tom Clancy, published in 1998 but set in 2025. I think I probably got enough of a flavour from this not to need to try out the rest of the series of 18 books. Our protagonist, Matt Hunter, tracks down a bunch of hackers who are not only disrupting important cultural events like baseball games, but also infiltrating embassies in Washington and stealing information. The virtual world in this version of 2025 is much more hologrammy and immersive than we have actually managed to generate in real life. It’s the least dystopian future of any of the books and films set on Earth in 2025 that I have tried so far – the future of John Varley’s Titan also seems fairly rosy, but it’s set among the moons of Saturn. You can get it here.
Do I decide for myself what to do next, or let someone else decide for me? If I decide for myself it seems I have two options. I can move on from here with Stewart. Or I can return underground.
An Australian YA post-apocalyptic novel, where a teen girl and boy (and his faithful basset hound, Stewart) take the first tentative steps to rebuilding society. Her parents have eked out a living on the surface of a devastated and polluted world for years; his people have retreated underground to hide from the poisoned planet. Nothing very remarkable plot-wise, but the protagonists’ voices are caught distinctively and believably. You can get it here.
We discover at the very end of the book that the whole story is set in 2025, which was my reason for reading it – yet another dystopia for next year…
This is the earliest film set in 2025 that I have been able to identify (the initial scene has a radio announcer announcing that it is 10 May 2025). It actually made rather an interesting pair with Stephen King’s The Running Man – it starts with our hero as a player in a survivalist game show in what we are told are the ruins of New York. Violent reality TV is a surprisingly frequent theme in sf set in 2025; there’s another one coming up. The second half of the film then switches to Mad Max mode as our hero leads his gang across the desert (that flat desert which, as we all know, is located in the vicinity of New York). This very very graphic trailer will give you an idea.
It’s a silly and violent film, which you can skip in good conscience. The script barely makes sense and jumps from place to place without explanation. Al Cliver as the protagonist is pretty wooden. Laura Gemser, playing the leader of the mutants who he rescues, is much better known as the title character of the eleven Black Emmanuelle films, most of which were also directed by Joe D’Amato. Here she mostly keeps her clothes on, and effortlessly dominates any scene she is in.
The music is good, by Carlo Maria Cordio who went on to score Terminator 2: Judgement Day six years later. There’s also a very memorably unpleasant blue mutant. But this is not going to be more than a footnote in my roundup of sf set next year.
Another of the books set in 2025 which I have been reading through, this one a grim grim dystopia from 1983 where inequality has soared and the public get their kicks from watching a reality TV show where the contestants are hunted to death across the urban streetscape of a decaying USA. Several of the sf stories set in 2025 feature violent reality TV; a couple more to come.
Our hero does his best to beat the system, but the odds are stacked against him. Like Disch’s 334, it starts in New York, but the hunt for the protagonist takes him up the northeastern seaboard as far as Portland, Maine (where the author actually lives). You can get it here. The dystopia hits uncomfortably close to home, and…
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SPOILER
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…the book ends with a rather prophetic denouement as our hero flies his plane into a skyscraper to wreak vengeance on the system.
No one had ever tried to orbit a toroidal body. Themis was 1300 kilometers across and only 250 kilometers wide. The torus was flat along the outside, and 175 kilometers from top to bottom. The density of the torus varied radically, supporting the view that it was composed of a thick floor along the outside, an atmosphere about that, and a thin canopy arching overhead holding the air inside.
When I started my research on science fiction books set in 2025, this was one of the first that emerged. The date in the first two chapters is specified as May 2025, but we are told that the end of the book is set eight months or so later, so I guess it eases into 2026. I am still counting it for 2025.
This is John Varley’s best known book, as measured by Goodreads and LibraryThing readership. Published in 1979, it’s a clear riposte to Ringworld(1970) and Rendezvous with Rama (1973), in that the protagonists discover a vast alien structure, but it’s permanently in our solar system (orbiting Saturn as a more obscure moon) and also sentient, a huge wheel with individual segments of the rim each having their own micro-environment. Our protagonists, a group of sexy astronauts, go through the usual quest to find out what is really going on and make discoveries about themselves as well as about the world. I must say that I enjoyed it a lot. You can get it here.
As with the last two sf stories set in 2025 that I sampled, there is an interesting look at reproductive rights. When the crew first land, the women all discover that they have been made pregnant by the entity behind it all, and the medical chap on the crew terminates the pregnancies without a fuss. There aren’t a lot of sf books that deal with abortion.
Next in my list of books set in 2025 is The Running Man, by Stephen King.
When I first read this, exactly ten years ago, I wrote:
I must say that it wasn’t a brilliant choice of holiday novel; the disjointed narrative failed to engage me, and I felt that the stories never quite concentrated sufficiently on either near-future world-building or interesting characterisation. It was interesting that Disch correctly saw the politics of reproduction as being so prominent in the twenty-first century, although the detail has turned out rather differently.
My concentration was at a low ebb in August 2014 because of my role at that year’s Worldcon, and I think that I was unfair. It’s not actually a novel; it’s a group of six short pieces, with a shared setting and some shared characters, all set in and around 334 East 11th Street in New York, so I was demanding more coherence than necessary. Within each story, the characterization makes sense. And I’ll get to the world building.
I have come back to it as one of the relatively small number of books set in 2025, looking at next year as science fiction saw it. Actually only one and a half of the six shorter pieces that make up the book is explicitly set in 2025, and the longest piece (which shares the title “334”) has 43 sections, all dated to the years 2021, 2024 and 2026, so none of them in 2025. I missed that when I did my 2021 and 2024 write ups.
It’s interesting that the politics of reproductive health is one of the themes of the book. The 2020s of Disch’s world are over-populated and subject to government regulation, particularly in deciding who gets to have children. The first story is about a young man whose social rating is too low to allow him to become a parent, and his efforts to overcome that. Another is about a couple who do qualify for children, and decide that the male partner will be the one who actually becomes pregnant.
Otherwise, it’s a typical late 60’s / early 70’s story, set in a rather grim dehumanising dystopian society, where advances in technology haven’t brought much improvement for most people and the smart people exploit the cracks in the system. Somewhat depressing. You can get it here.
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 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.
