On Valentine’s Day of this year we had a weird moment when some smarty pointed out that the replicant Pris from Bladerunner (played by Darryl Hannah) had the incept date February 14, 2016. Science fiction is plagued with titles and references to dates. Which, of course, come to pass and are completely wrong. The classic example is 1984. I remember that year. Prince sang “Purple Rain,” Ghostbusters and The Terminator were on the big screen, and I probably had a mullet. Not exactly George Orwell. He got the title by reversing the date he wrote the book, 1948. He wasn’t really trying to predict what 1984 would be like. But again, with science fiction, we have this idea that SF is supposed to predict what is to come. Blame HG Wells with his Things to Come!. Today’s writers insist that SF tells more about when it was written than what will be.
A good example of all this is the story “June 6, 2016” by George Allan England. The story appeared in Colliers on April 22, 1916, a little over a hundred years before the titular date. And as with titles of this sort, it is a prediction of what the world will be like in a century. Was it truly predictive or did it tell us more about what people were worried about in 1916? Things that concerned them included World War I grinding away in Europe, though the US wouldn’t enter for another year. Women’s suffrage was four years away in the US. Marconi’s radio broadcasted about the maritime rescues of the Titanic in October 1912 and again with the Lusitania in May of 1915. Despite these obvious topical elements in the story, England also proposes some new ideas. How accurate is his guess? We’ll see.
Read the rest:
https://www.michaelmay.online/2016/06/june-6-2016-predictions-and.html
