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.