Reinventing the future

Ahh, the future. It's a great place where all of life's problems will be solved and replaced with newer, more complicated problems. And as critically disrespected as science fiction may be as a genre, it has a special place in American culture. We love looking forward and imagining newer and better things.

And imagine we do. For Minority Report, Steven Spielberg assembled a team of "experts" to sketch out 2054 for him. Sure, it looks great (and it's nice to know that addictive street drugs will only become scarier and more addictive), but it's still not going to be right. It's hardly worth spending that much time and effort on something that's going to be wrong anyway. Writers in the '50s couldn't conceive of computers, and it's shortsighted to think we won't come up with a similarly unexpected revolution in the next 50 years.

Sure, I can't ask moviemakers or writers to get everything _ or much of anything _ right. The future's a pretty intangible thing. I'd rather they didn't try so hard sometimes, really. Why pretend to be right if it's impossible?

Think of The Jetsons. Sure, you've got some great quasi-futuristic devices: robot maids, food pills, flying cars, domes on everything, and the like. But to the show's credit, it doesn't even pretend to be a realistic possible future. It was a '60s sitcom like almost any other, complete with smart-aleck housewives and slapstick humor. It's kind of odd, though, that with all that slick technology the robot maid has a head like a miniature charcoal grill. Apparently we're doomed to give up on aesthetics by the time we get flying cars.

More serious works, however, pretend to adopt realism but fall prey to their environments anyway. Alien may have a dark, gritty, practical view of the future, but it's still a future where people wear Reeboks and computers consist of nothing but flashing diodes. Apparently on-the-fly interstellar navigation is possible using computer systems from 1979, and no one's even bothered to upgrade to Microsoft Windows.

Audiences should realize and appreciate how unlikely many aspects of our science fiction are. Visions of the future from any era always miss something important because they're colored by the present culture. We look ahead and we don't really imagine anything new; we imagine the present with a futuristic twist. Music, clothes, architecture, you name it _ it just looks cheesy once you look back on it.

We seem to overestimate the progress of our space program pretty reliably, too. According to 2001: A Space Odyssey, shouldn't we be sending manned space missions to the outer planets so they can get ruined by insane artificial intelligences by now? At the very least, we should have some insane artificial intelligences floating around. Of course, maybe humanity has taken the cautionary messages of science fiction to heart: artificial intelligence is always a bad idea. You end up with rampant prejudice, an unemployed populace, or deadly mass destruction every time. It's just not worth it.

Really, though, the year 2000 was a big disappointment. So many utopian and dystopian futures should have come to pass by now. I want robot servants! I want malaise and drug addiction! I want the moral dilemmas that come with space colonization! Interstellar war! Laser technology!

And weren't lasers supposed to be the be-all and end-all of the future, too? And what do we use them for now? Laser pointers. Understand that I feel a little let down.

You want slightly more over-the-top futures? How about Total Recall? Put aside the movie's great reality-bending aspects and focus on Sharon Stone in neon aerobic clothes with a knife (you know you want to). Amazing how much workout clothes of the future look like ones from 1990, eh? And amazing how much all the other clothes match up, too. A cutting-edge Martian club looks pretty flimsy and decrepit now _ I don't care if you're a mutant and you have to pay for your air, you don't go to a crappy place like that, even if there are three-breasted women there.

Even better: Back To The Future Part II. Can you imagine a future more tainted by the '80s? Stupid expandable jackets, self-tying shoes, holographic waiters (honk if you remember Max Headroom). The flying cars are a nice touch _ no self-respecting future society would be without them _ and so is the miniature, dehydrated pizza. Sure, Robert Zemeckis was trying to be funny, but it's the sort of funny future that we'd never imagine today.

Talking about Star Trek opens up a can of worms too big for this little pond, but Next Generation fans: explain the gravity thing to me. Think hard. No matter how much damage the Enterprise takes, the artificial gravity never fails. They shut off life support, but the gravity stays on. And every planet has normal Earth gravity? You're asking too much of me there. I can't take it.

You want really bad science fiction? Let's talk Red Planet. There's too much to attack there to even do it justice, but for starters: why would you send a military robot with this emergency crew to Mars? Why would you equip this robot with a special "guerrilla warfare" mode designed only to murder the entire crew? Why would you build the robot so it would switch to that mode by default when damaged? Seriously.

These people accept from the very start that their robot may go crazy and try to kill them. Who the hell designs these things? If you're building a robot to navigate your ship, don't teach it how to fight with knives just for the hell of it. It's just bad practice.

So there are the hasty visions, the funny visions, the utterly implausible visions... all wrong, of course, but often pretty entertaining regardless. Good science fiction is tough to craft, and I don't want to fault anyone for trying. Just remember, though, that what seems slick and impressive now will undoubtedly seem ridiculous in a few years. Come 2054, will Minority Report look overreaching or just silly? My bet is large helpings of both.