Introduction

This is the sixth time that I have compiled a list of science fiction’s predictions for the year ahead. I cover TV, films, books, comics and games set in 2025, but I only look at those that are more than twenty years old – so for instance this year I am skipping Vernor Vinge’s award-winning 2006 novel Rainbow’s End. That still leaves plenty to choose from.

Dystopia I: environmental catastrophe

I’m sorry to say that quite a lot of the science fiction set in 2025 has a dystopian theme, though few are quite as bleak as the 1986 film Future Hunters, starring Robert Patrick and Linda Carroll. Here’s its opening scene:

The film only spends about twenty minutes in the future before timewarping back to 1986, where the protagonists must find the Spear of Destiny by defeating its Amazon warrior guards in alliance with a tribe of midgets. This apparently will avert the ecological disaster that would otherwise destroy society.

It’s a common theme. (Ecological disaster, that is.) T. Coraghessan Boyle’s 2000 novel A Friend of the Earth, which features a disturbing dead frog on the cover, alternates timelines between the early 1990s when things started to go wrong, and 2025 when the protagonist starts to put his life back together (though it is too late to avoid environmental catastrophe).

Caroline MacDonald’s 1992 YA novel, The Lake at the End of the World, ends with two groups of devastated survivors of the climate apocalypse coming together to ring in the new year of 2025.

And of course in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, part of which is set in 2025, environmental catastrophe is piled on top of political catastrophe and societal breakdown.

Dystopia II: violent sport

Not all of the 2025 dystopias involve environmental catastrophe. Violent games are another recurrent theme. Most famously, in the best known book set in 2025 that I can identify, the protagonist of Stephen King’s 1982 novel The Running Man is given 30 days to escape a televised manhunt, screened as a distraction from the horrible dystopian reality of American society. (The 1987 film with Arnold Schwarzenegger is set a few years earlier.)

Televised violent sport is also central to two films set in 2025. The 1983 film Endgame (Bronx lotta finale), starring Al Cliver and Laura Gemser, sees our protagonists in televised combat through the streets of a devastated future New York, before escaping to the nearby desert for a final showdown the bad guys.

And in the 1988 film Futuresport, starring Dean Cain, Vanessa Williams, and Wesley Snipes, the American protagonists of the massively popular game known as, er, Futuresport, play a high-stakes match against their Asian opponents, with the sovereignty of Hawaii as the prize.

And while we’re on the theme of fictional violent games, in the three actual video games that I have found which are set in 2025 you have to shoot your way out of trouble.

In the 1994 Impossible Mission 2025 for the Amiga (remake of a 1984 Commodore 64 game, Impossible Mission, which wasn’t set in any particular year), you also have to put together the pieces of a puzzle to defeat the evil scientist and his robots.

In the 2000 Japanese game for Dreamcast, Undercover AD2025 Kei, you play a policewoman avenging her husband on the criminals who killed him.

And in the 2005 multi-platform game F.E.A.R. First Encounter Assault Recon, you play a special operative with lots of shooty bangy things, called in to deal with a psychic mutant capable of wreaking havoc on society.

Dystopia III: 334

Sometimes a dystopia is a dystopia because life in general is just shit. This is the case for the wide range of characters in Thomas M. Disch’s 334, who sprawl across the years between 2021 and 2026, with one and a half of the six stories in the book explicitly set in 2025 and the whole book set in and around 334 East 11th Street in New York. Economic collapse and state intrusion have made reproductive rights a key issue in Disch’s future, with some protagonists desperate to conceive and others desperate to avoid the consequences.

Outer space and reproduction

The three stories set in 2025 that feature space exploration also both feature reproduction as a sub-theme. The alien Megasoid which escapes its zoo in the 1964 Outer Limits episode, The Duplicate Man, wishes only to swamp the planet earth with its offspring. (Though the main theme of the episode is the creation of a duplicate of the protagonist to hunt it down.)

And, soon after arriving in a huge artificial structure in orbit around Saturn, the female protagonists of John Varley’s 1979 novel Titan discover that they are all pregnant. (And the main theme of the book is the quest for the alien intelligence responsible.)

Hatching and despatching is also a core theme of the short 2005 Japanese film, Negadon: The Monster from Mars – Negadon itself is brought to Earth as an egg, from which the monster then emerges; meanwhile the scientist who tracks it down is coming to terms with the fact that his daughter died when his killer robot malfunctioned.

How we get to dystopia

Skip to the next section if you don’t want to be spoilered for a comic published in 2003.

In Superman & Batman Generations 3: The 21st Century!: Century 21: Doomsday Minus One, by John Byrne, the high-tech 2025 of most of the story is devastated on the last page by an anti-technology bomb detonated by Lex Luthor, which reduces society to pre-industrial life.

Kids save the day

A couple more high-tech future series feature bright and talented kids who defeat the bad guys. The teens who constitute Tom Clancy’s Net Force Explorers, in a series of eighteen books published between 1998 and 2002 (none of which was written by Tom Clancy), use their cyber skills to Fight Crime.

And the thirty-eight episodes of 2005 TV series Power Rangers S.P.D. see yet another new set of Power Rangers defending Earth against Emperor Gruumm and his Troobian Empire.

Timey-wimey

I end this survey with three quite different gonzo takes on 2025. In the 2003 film Timecop 2: The Berlin Decision, Jason Scott Lee as the protagonist must try and prevent the villain, played by Thomas Ian Griffith, from going back to 1940 and killing Hitler. (What would be so bad about that?)

In S.M. Stirling’s error-strewn 2002 novel The Peshawar Lancers, the world is still recovering from the devastating meteor impacts of the 1870s which destroyed Europe, and our gallant British heroes with their plucky Indian allies fight off the devil-worshipping Russians.

And from 1986, La Femme piège (The Woman Trap), the middle volume of Enki Bilal’s Nikopol Trilogy, features a time-warping fax machine, ancient Egyptian gods, a sercret space mission, mind-altering drugs and sex and violence in Paris and Berlin. What more could you want for 2025?

Where to get them:

Future Hunters: whole film on Dailymotion
A Friend of the Earth: Amazon
The Lake at the End of the World: Amazon
Parable of the Sower: Amazon
The Running Man: Amazon
Endgame: Bronx lotta finale: whole thing on Youtube
Futuresport: whole thing on Youtube
Impossible Mission 2025: full playthrough on Youtube
Undercover AD2025 Kei: full playthrough on Youtube
F.E.A.R. First Encounter Assault Recon: full playthrough on Youtube
334: Amazon
The Duplicate Man: I can only find it on ok.ru
Titan: Amazon
Negadon: The Monster from Mars: whole thing on Youtube
Doomsday Minus One: in omnibus via Amazon
Tom Clancy’s Net Force Explorers: Amazon
Power Rangers S.P.D.: all episodes on Youtube
Timecop 2: The Berlin Decision: Amazon
The Peshawar Lancers: Amazon
La Femme piège in The Nikopol Trilogy: Amazon

Set in 2025:
Television: The Outer Limits: The Duplicate Man (1964)
Film: Endgame (Bronx lotta finale) (1983); Future Hunters (1986); Futuresport (1998); Timecop 2: The Berlin Decision (2003)
Novels: 334 (1972); Titan (1979); The Running Man (1982); The Lake at the End of the World (1988); Tom Clancy’s Net Force Explorers: Virtual Vandals (1998); A Friend of the Earth (2000); The Peshawar Lancers (2002)
Comics: The Nikopol Trilogy: The Woman Trap (1986); Superman & Batman: Generations III #2: Doomsday Minus One (2003)