From the Whistler

In The Terminator (1984) a cyborg assassin travels back in time to kill Sarah Connor, destined to be the mother of a famous resistance leader. The Terminator himself hails from 2029—just four years from now. The film imagines 2029 to be a post-apocalyptic era that is nonetheless technologically advanced enough to engineer killer cyborgs, time travel and super-intelligent machines. Suffice to say, The Terminator was not exactly prophetic. That’s typical of a Hollywood popcorn movie, but serious literature is harder to dismiss. The year the film was released, 1984, was imagined by George Orwell to be a time of brutal totalitarian government and Thought Police. In the novel Britain has been renamed “Airstrip One” and is part of the superpower Oceania. Instead, the real Britain produced Margaret Thatcher and Wham!

Even predictions from scientifically researched papers, such as reports in the 1980s that depicted climate change as a “time bomb” or akin to a “nuclear holocaust,” can be wildly exaggerated. Predicting cultural trends, or what artist will be popular in even a hundred years, we are on even shakier ground. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sketch “A Select Party”, one of the personages who arrives at the Man of Fancy’s castle in the sky is Posterity, “a guest from the far future.” The partygo­ers throng about him; they speak of the sacrifices they have made, or show him their writing. He’ll have none of it:

“Gentlemen, my good friends,” cried he, breaking loose from a misty poet who strove to hold him by the button, “I pray you attend to your own business, and leave me to take care of mine!”

Yet futuristic visions do have their fascination—and often possess a grain of truth to them. The climate reports from the 1980s did predict future temperature increases and CO2 levels fairly accurately, and in the self-censorship of the politically correct I hear faint echoes of the Thought Police. Even cyborgs have become a reality, though most cyborgs of 2025 are just ordinary people who have cochlear or retinal implants.

So much for our disclaimer. You are now welcome to stroll through Whistling Shade’s “Far Future” issue and revel in the spaceships, time traveling velocipedes, ghosts, elves, house trees, and evolved animals of the distant tomorrow.

As for the near future (the next fifty years or so), I did what any sensible citizen of 2025 would do, and asked Chat GPT. After regurgitating the expected list of expected things (fusion, smart cars, moon colonies, virtual reality, quantum computing) and placing itself (of course) at the top of the list, that chatbot waxed profound, declaring:

The next 50 years will likely be a blend of transformative innova­tion and profound ethical dilemmas that redefine what it means to be human.

But now that I think of it, that statement could easily describe any fifty-year period in the past few centuries. So here’s my prediction: the real future, when it comes, will be like nothing you (or anyone else) has ever imagined.

- Joel Van Valin