Ever seen an old book, tv show or movie try to describe events a couple of decades in the future, only to have history take a completely different turn, so we end up with things like the Soviet Union still being a thing in the Star Trek and Clarke's 2001 series? If so, you might have just found yourself with some good ole fashioned Honorary Alternate History, basically what we call Speculative Fiction writers who throw the dice and get snake eyes.
Some cases, like the background worldbuilding in Star Trek might be subtle, and you'll probably miss a lot, since many hints are dropped in forgettable episodes. But if you know how to look and piece together the pieces, you can tell that history diverged somewhat early, since we have Nuclear Orbital Weapons in the 1960s (Assignment Earth), Genetically-Engineered Supermen being created sometime in the 20th Century and taking over during the 90s (Space Seed), the Greek Gods being aliens (Who Mourns for Adonais) and figures like Leonardo da Vinci in fact being an immortal sumerian named Flint (Requiem for Methuselah)
An example of the opposite, a work that looks at a hypothetical future exclusively, most likely because the author has an ideological ax to grind, can be found in Anthony Burgess' 1985, in which evil Labour Unions (a big concern of 1970s UK) have taken over the United Kingdom and are turning it into a syndicalist dystopia, as so are less evil, but still evil, Muslim Immigrants, who are slowly converting Good Old Christian England. Also, prince Charles becomes King after an evil General Strike. The book was written a year before Thatcher was elected to power.
And now, since we like talking about our favorite examples of the genre, here are two examples I found pretty interesting:
One is the setting of the Patlabor franchise, based on a manga from the 1980s, and which includes an show, OVAs, movies and a live action movie/series or two. The manga, which started in 1988, imagines the 1998-2002 era as one in which global warming is taken more seriously, giant robots called "Labors" are commonly employed in construction and both the police and the military have also started to use them, as drunken construction workers or criminals hijacking the robots are quite a problem, particulary in Tokyo Bay, where the aforementioned Global Warming issue and rising sea levels have led to Japan implementing a plan to fill up the bay in a massive land reclamation project, a la the Netherlands, called the Babylon Project.
In addition to a seemingly surviving Soviet Union, which also has military labors, we have things such as enviromental terrorists attacking the land reclamation project, Japanese military labors in a UN Peacekeeping mission in 1994 Cambodia gone wrong, some alternate military gear and even the ocassional genetically engineered monstruosity, coup attempt by the JSDF or Private Defense Contractor running rampant with its Military Robots.
The second is an older example, one I found by coincidence amongst my grandfather's old library. Paul Erdman, one of the fathers of the "Financial Thriller" genre, also a had an unofficial trilogy of sorts exploring the reams of speculative political fiction, in the form of three unconnected thrillers, each exploring the possible end of American Hegemony on a different level.
In the first and most successful book, The Crash of '79, Erdman imagines a world in which the Shah takes that very fancy military hardware the USA has been providing him over the years and uses it to conquer the Persian Gulf and restore the old Persian Empire, in the aptly named "Operation Sassanid". But before he does so, he enlists the help of an independent Jewish scientist to build himself a nuclear arsenal. But because in one scene the Shah reveals himself to be anti-semitic and to have less than good intentions towards Israel once he's done conquering the Arabs, the Jewish Scientists is persuaded by his Friend in the Mossad to turn the Shah's bombs into Dirty Bombs by lacing them with Cobalt, instead of the cleaner bombs that would have allowed the Shah to nuke the Arabian armies but keep the oil fields.
End result is that the Shah falls in 1979, the Persian Gulf's Oil Fields are radioactive for 100 years or so, and an Oil Shock cripples the world economy, to the degree in which the Soviet Union is the dominant world power, and things like commercial aviation and martinis are a rarity.
Silly in parts, but because it predicted the year the Shah would fall, and the oil shock, it was praised.
Slightly sillier, but just as interesting, is his next book, The Last Days of America. Long story short, Franz Josef Strauss is elected Chancellor of West Germany of 1985, enlist the help of an American Defense Contractor undergoing bankruptcy to develop Cruise Missiles capable of reaching the Soviet Union and giving Germany its own deterrence (the nukes they developed separately) and by the end of the book, not only is NATO gone, but America is effectively retreating from all its alliances. Still, less dystopic than the last one.
And even less dystopic is the very last one, The Panic of '89, based on the debt default crises of the 80s, in which three unnamed South American Nations plot to wreack havoc on the US economy through the use of their debts, only to be foiled by the protagonist (the only one in the trilogy to actually accomplish anything) and some help from the Soviet Union, IIRC. Overall the weaker, not because of the happy ending or anything, it's just less gripping and the plot is more finance-focused than the last two.
Do you have any examples that come to mind? Any favorites?
Some cases, like the background worldbuilding in Star Trek might be subtle, and you'll probably miss a lot, since many hints are dropped in forgettable episodes. But if you know how to look and piece together the pieces, you can tell that history diverged somewhat early, since we have Nuclear Orbital Weapons in the 1960s (Assignment Earth), Genetically-Engineered Supermen being created sometime in the 20th Century and taking over during the 90s (Space Seed), the Greek Gods being aliens (Who Mourns for Adonais) and figures like Leonardo da Vinci in fact being an immortal sumerian named Flint (Requiem for Methuselah)
An example of the opposite, a work that looks at a hypothetical future exclusively, most likely because the author has an ideological ax to grind, can be found in Anthony Burgess' 1985, in which evil Labour Unions (a big concern of 1970s UK) have taken over the United Kingdom and are turning it into a syndicalist dystopia, as so are less evil, but still evil, Muslim Immigrants, who are slowly converting Good Old Christian England. Also, prince Charles becomes King after an evil General Strike. The book was written a year before Thatcher was elected to power.
And now, since we like talking about our favorite examples of the genre, here are two examples I found pretty interesting:
One is the setting of the Patlabor franchise, based on a manga from the 1980s, and which includes an show, OVAs, movies and a live action movie/series or two. The manga, which started in 1988, imagines the 1998-2002 era as one in which global warming is taken more seriously, giant robots called "Labors" are commonly employed in construction and both the police and the military have also started to use them, as drunken construction workers or criminals hijacking the robots are quite a problem, particulary in Tokyo Bay, where the aforementioned Global Warming issue and rising sea levels have led to Japan implementing a plan to fill up the bay in a massive land reclamation project, a la the Netherlands, called the Babylon Project.
In addition to a seemingly surviving Soviet Union, which also has military labors, we have things such as enviromental terrorists attacking the land reclamation project, Japanese military labors in a UN Peacekeeping mission in 1994 Cambodia gone wrong, some alternate military gear and even the ocassional genetically engineered monstruosity, coup attempt by the JSDF or Private Defense Contractor running rampant with its Military Robots.
The second is an older example, one I found by coincidence amongst my grandfather's old library. Paul Erdman, one of the fathers of the "Financial Thriller" genre, also a had an unofficial trilogy of sorts exploring the reams of speculative political fiction, in the form of three unconnected thrillers, each exploring the possible end of American Hegemony on a different level.
In the first and most successful book, The Crash of '79, Erdman imagines a world in which the Shah takes that very fancy military hardware the USA has been providing him over the years and uses it to conquer the Persian Gulf and restore the old Persian Empire, in the aptly named "Operation Sassanid". But before he does so, he enlists the help of an independent Jewish scientist to build himself a nuclear arsenal. But because in one scene the Shah reveals himself to be anti-semitic and to have less than good intentions towards Israel once he's done conquering the Arabs, the Jewish Scientists is persuaded by his Friend in the Mossad to turn the Shah's bombs into Dirty Bombs by lacing them with Cobalt, instead of the cleaner bombs that would have allowed the Shah to nuke the Arabian armies but keep the oil fields.
End result is that the Shah falls in 1979, the Persian Gulf's Oil Fields are radioactive for 100 years or so, and an Oil Shock cripples the world economy, to the degree in which the Soviet Union is the dominant world power, and things like commercial aviation and martinis are a rarity.
Silly in parts, but because it predicted the year the Shah would fall, and the oil shock, it was praised.
Slightly sillier, but just as interesting, is his next book, The Last Days of America. Long story short, Franz Josef Strauss is elected Chancellor of West Germany of 1985, enlist the help of an American Defense Contractor undergoing bankruptcy to develop Cruise Missiles capable of reaching the Soviet Union and giving Germany its own deterrence (the nukes they developed separately) and by the end of the book, not only is NATO gone, but America is effectively retreating from all its alliances. Still, less dystopic than the last one.
And even less dystopic is the very last one, The Panic of '89, based on the debt default crises of the 80s, in which three unnamed South American Nations plot to wreack havoc on the US economy through the use of their debts, only to be foiled by the protagonist (the only one in the trilogy to actually accomplish anything) and some help from the Soviet Union, IIRC. Overall the weaker, not because of the happy ending or anything, it's just less gripping and the plot is more finance-focused than the last two.
Do you have any examples that come to mind? Any favorites?
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