Tag Archives: set in 2026

Life in 2026, according to science fiction: Mars, dystopia and devastation

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For the last few years, I’ve succeeded in putting together a decent list, and sometimes even a video, of the sf works set in the year to come (with the caveat that they must have been published or released at least twenty years before). I started with 2020 (little did we know…), and went on to 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025.

2026 is surprisingly sparse for this project. There are small parts of two very well known novels set in this year; there is the framing narrative of a forgotten radio play; there is a very small part of a deservedly obscure film; there are two video games from the 1990s; there is also a very famous film based on a novel which is generally described as set in 2026; and there are three classic short stories by Ray Bradbury. You’ve probably read or seen several of these.

(I’ll add that AI research was pretty useless for this project, and threw up several false positives which I had to waste time checking, notably telling me that the later volumes of the well-known manga series Akira are set in 2026. They are not.)

Mars

Kim Stanley Robinson’s epic Mars trilogy is mainly set many decades in the future. But its internal chronology begins (on page 30 of Red Mars, the first book, which was published in 1992) with the launch of a spaceship carrying the first wave of colonists from Earth, on 21 December 2026. The first manned landing on Mars was in 2020 in this timeline. In our timeline, there is no chance that we’ll be sending even one person to Mars this year, let alone a mixed crew of a hundred scientists mainly from the USA and Russia; human spaceflight has frankly not advanced much since 1992. You can get Red Mars here.

You don’t have to go to Mars by rocket. The 2005 film Doom, loosely based on the game and generally panned by critics, starts with Rosamund Pike as Samantha Grimm telling us, “In the year 2026, archaeologists working in the Nevada desert discovered a portal to an ancient city on Mars. They called this portal the Ark. Twenty years later, we’re still struggling to understand why it was built, and what happened to the civilisation that built it.” The rest of the film is set in 2046.

There is also a 1981 BBC radio play, Return from Mars, in which the legendary Jet Morgan and his crew turn up in Earth orbit in 2026, having been to Mars and another planet in the meantime, but most of the story is about their adventures elsewhere, with the framing narrative being their attempts to explain themselves to Space Traffic Control in 2026. You can listen to Return from Mars here.

Last but definitely not least, the three last stories of Ray Bradbury’s classic 1951 collection The Martian Chronicles are set in this coming year. “April 2026: The Long Years”, originally published in 1948, sees a rescue party finding a lost astronaut and his family, and realising that all is not as it seems. I’ll save the next story to the end, as it is set on Earth rather than Mars. But the final story, “October 2026: The Million Year Picnic”, originally published in 1946, is the one where one of the few surviving humans on Mars takes his wife and three sons to a canal to show them the Martians.

They reached the canal. It was long and straight and cool and wet and reflective in the night.
“I’ve always wanted to see a Martian,” said Michael. “Where are they, Dad? You promised.”
“There they are,” said Dad, and he shifted Michael on his shoulder and pointed straight down.
The Martians were there. Timothy began to shiver.
The Martians were there–in the canal–reflected in the water. Timothy and Michael and Robert and Mom and Dad.
The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water….

Dystopia

Fifty pages out of 330 in Octavia E. Butler’s classic Parable of the Sower (published in 1993) are set between June and December 2026. This is the grim section in which both the brother and father of Lauren, the protagonist, are killed by the forces of violent chaos lurking outside their fragile Californian community, in a USA which is disintegrating into anarchy. Lauren at least gets some action with her boyfriend, but their world is a very bad and decaying place, uncomfortably closer to our own than when it was written. You can get Parable of the Sower here and the graphic novel version here.

A different kind of dystopia is portrayed in the 1925 novel Metropolis, by Thea von Harbou, and in the 1927 film based on the book and directed by her husband Fritz Lang. Here, the workers are enslaved by the ruling classes and must service the monstrous machines that keep the city going, while the toffs party on. The son of the city’s ruler, and his more plebeian girlfriend, lead a cathartic process of social disruption and reconciliation, unwittingly triggered by the mad scientist who was originally responsible for the city’s growth through the use of the girl’s psychotic robot double. The film is spectacular and there is a happy ending, but, as one might have said in Germany in 1927, for how long? The machines are of course late industrial, but it’s difficult not to think of today’s techbros when watching it.

I don’t actually find anything in the original text of either book or film specifying that the year is 1926, but that does seem to be a long and strong tradition, including Giorgio Moroder’s 1984 edit; and I have little enough else to list here. You can get Metropolis the novel here and watch the 2.5 hour film on YouTube here.

There are also two video games from the 1990s in which the player goes around a dystopian city of the year 2026, biffing the bad guys. In the 1991 arcade game Captain Commando (キャプテンコマンド), Captain Commando and his three buddies Fight Crime in Metro City. In the 1995 Sega Game Gear game Arena, Maze of Death, you’re fighting the evil corporation who control the population by broadcasting brainwashing propaganda. So two somewhat different takes.

Devastation

Most chillingly, Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains”, first published in 1950 and included in The Martian Chronicles under the title “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains”, starts with the attempts of a house computer to wake up its humans.

“Today is August 4, 2026,” said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, “in the city of Allendale, California.” It repeated the date three times for memory’s sake. “Today is Mr. Featherstone’s birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita’s marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bills.”

But the humans will not wake up; along with most of Allendale, they were vaporised the previous afternoon by an atomic bomb, leaving only their silhouettes etched onto the outside wall. The house valiantly functions without them, but is destroyed in an accidental fire, leaving almost nothing behind:

Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam: “Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…”

5 August is the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. (It was the morning of 6 August in Japan, but still 5 August in the USA.)

From the 1953 comic strip adaptation of the story by Wally Wood, colours added 1992 by Paul Rivoche

“The Long Years”, “There Will Come Soft Rains” and “Million Year Picnic” are all part of The Martian Chronicles, which you can get here. A 2001 version changed the year to 2057, but all other copies before and since have kept 2026. You can get two graphic versions of “There Will Come Soft Rains” here, and you can listen to Leonard Nimoy reading it here. I vividly remember a teacher playing that to our class when I was about twelve, around the time that Margaret Thatcher was elected.

Travel to Mars through rocket launch or alien portal; social disintegration or rule by tech lords; dystopian urban combat; nuclear devastation. Take your pick. Let’s hope it works out.

Metropolis, by Thea von Harbou and film by Fritz Lang

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Second paragraph of third chapter of novel:

Menschen, gierig nach dem Gewinn von Sekunden, stürzten zu ihm herein und, Stockwerke höher, tiefer wieder hinaus. Keiner achtete seiner. Der eine, die andere erkannte ihn wohl. Aber noch deutete niemand die Tropfen an seinen Schläfen anders als gleiche Gier nach dem Gewinn von Sekunden. Gut, er wollte warten, bis man es besser wußte, bis man ihn packte und aus der Zelle stieß: Was nimmst du uns den Platz weg, Lump, der du Zeit hast? Krieche die Treppen hinunter oder die Feuerleitern …Persons, greedy to gain a few seconds, stumbled in with him, and stories higher, or lower, out again. Nobody paid the least attention to him. One or two certainly recognised him. But, as yet, nobody interpreted the drops on his temples as being anything but a similar greed for the gain of a few seconds. All right – he would wait until they knew better, until they took him and threw him out of the cell: What are you taking up space for, you fool, if you’ve got so much time? Crawl down the stairs, or the fire escape…

Every year since 2020 I’ve done a round-up blog post detailing what science fiction has been set in the year to come. There is surprisingly little for 2026. Literally the only sf novel that I have found which is entirely set in that year is Metropolis, published in 1925 by Thea von Harbou. Even there, I didn’t find anything in the text of the book that explicitly references the year; but people have been writing that it is set in 2026 since soon after publication, so I am guessing that the original blurb may have said so.

The film and book have the same plot, which is not surprising as von Harbou wrote them both. A future heavily industrialised city depends on the labour of the underclass. Freder, the son and heir of the city’s founder Joh, falls in love with Maria, a women from the depths; meanwhile Rotwang, the city’s chief inventor, creates a robot version of Maria which incites the workers to rebellion. After near-disaster, the robot is destroyed and Freder reconciles his father with the workers.

I may have been unlucky with the translation, but I found the novel rather clunky and not at all subtle; of course it’s firmly rooted in the political ferment of the Weimar Republic, and it’s about von Harbou’s hope that social upheaval could be contained by a grand bargain between workers and rulers, provided that they avoid the snares of populism. This was not of course what actually happened in Germany, and the workers don’t actually seem to get much out of the grand bargain; the rulers are still the rulers at the end of the book. Earnest but not super well executed. You can get it here.

The film has the same plot, but the plot is not the point: under Fritz Lang’s direction, it’s a cinematic masterpiece, even if the version we have is stitched together from the surviving theatrical release and off-cuts found in Argentina. The activation of the robot Maria is the iconic scene, but almost all of it looks brilliant – the vast machinery, the city-scape, the crowd scenes of the workers, the fleeing children, the erotic frenzy of the posh chaps at the night club, the climactic battle on the roof top. The sophistication of the special effects sets a standard that was rarely equalled for decades after. And Birgitte Helm is unforgettable as the two Marias.

I watched it on my iPad in three chunks – during my recent trip to Montenegro – but I would happily pay to see it on a big screen, and I am inclined to seek out some more of von Harbou and Lang’s collaborations.

Set in 2026: Journey Into Space: The Return From Mars

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It’s not too early to start my reviews of sf set in 2026. Though actually there is not very much of it for this particular year. I have found two films (one of which is very famous and the other very obscure), a very famous short story, two well-known novels which are partly set in 2026 and which I have covered before, four games (none of which I have heard of, but that’s on me), a six-part anime series and one radio play, all written before my cutoff date of 2006, twenty years earlier.

(I have decided not to include The Pushcart War, a 1964 novel by Jean Merrill, which I enjoyed when it was told by Al Mancini on Jackanory in 1974, and then when I read the book for myself shortly afterward aged roughly eight. Wikipedia explains that the 1964 original edition was set in 1976; the 1985 reprint was set in 1996; and the 2014 edition is set in 2026. Authorial intent counts for a lot in my view, and anyway the 2014 edition misses my 2006 cutoff date.)

Journey into Space was a classic BBC radio series broadcast in 1953-58 and set in 1965-71, by which time the writer, Charles Chilton, expected that humanity would be exploring the Moon and Mars and meeting Martians. Chilton wrote a special 90-minute episode in 1981, called Return from Mars, in which Jet Morgan and the original crew are found trying to land on Earth in 2026, decades after they disappeared after the events of the last story. You can find it online in various places; I found the Internet Archive recording (in two parts) the most audible.

I’m afraid that you won’t find out much about Chilton’s imagined 2026 here, because most of the story is a flashback to Jet Morgan and his team exploring what appears to be a very different solar system (or is it ours, somehow at a different time?) where they have arrived via time warp, and then explaining it to bewildered 2026 space traffic controllers at the very beginning and the very end.

It’s pretty old fashioned stuff, and would I think have seemed old fashioned in the 1950s, never mind in the immediate aftermath of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The social structure of the planet Talia where our heroes meet the beautiful Cassia is, frankly, fascist, with no real interrogation of that. Cassia falls in love with Jet Morgan because they have to have something to do. It’s three stars out of five, maybe two and a half.

Out in the real world in 1981, Christopher Priest’s The Affirmation, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, John Crowley’s Little, Big, Philip K. Dick’s Valis, Julian May’s The Many Colored Land and C.J. Cherryh’s Downbelow Station were taking the genre to new places. Return from Mars is a case of “building yesterday’s future”, to coin a phrase.

Therr are two later one-off plays following the adventures of Jet Morgan and his crew, both of which are set in alternate continuities where the events of Return from Mars never happened and with the crew played by different actors again. I’m not rushing to hunt them down.