This week was the tenth anniversary of McFly Day, the day Marty McFly, in the film Back to the Future II, arrived in his own future: October 21, 2015.
Yeah, not only has it been thirty-six years since that movie came out, it’s ten years after the “future” segments take place. Which illustrates a problem with near-future science fiction: The calendar will inevitably catch up with your story.
Dated science fiction is nothing new. I’m sure George Orwell, writing in the 1940s, thought 1984 was impossibly far away.
Fun fact: That’s the year I graduated from high school.
Arthur Clarke correctly predicted we would have an orbiting space station by 2001. But the ISS isn’t wheel-shaped, doesn’t have artificial gravity, and isn’t used as a way station for moon trips.
These are just two examples of why I generally recommend that authors not include the year in science fiction stories if they can help it.
In his novel Contact, Carl Sagan omits any reference to the year. It was published in 1985 (coincidentally the same year the first Back to the Future movie came out). Read Contact now and you still have the feeling that it could happen in the near future. But in the movie version (1997), Robert Zemeckis (who also directed the Back to the Future movies) unfortunately nailed a potentially timeless story down to a specific time by casting Bill Clinton as the president of the United States.
Pardon this rant: In the book, the U.S. president is a woman. Lines that in the book belong to the president are, in the movie, given to Angela Basset, who plays the White House chief of staff. So Zemeckis set his story during the then present-day Clinton Administration so he could play with compositing his actors into news footage of the president, and in the process missed the opportunity to set the film in an unspecified future in which the president of the United States is a black woman.
Where was I…Oh, yes, dates.
The Star Trek franchise avoided this trap for the most part, by using “stardates” instead of calendar years for most time references. This is an excellent technique that many writers, especially of dystopian fiction, can take advantage of.
If your fictional storyworld involves a breakdown or complete restructuring of world governance systems, you could make up your own internal dating system. In the same way that events in the Hebrew Scriptures like Kings and Chronicles are said to happen in, for example, “the tenth year of King Soandso,” you can say things like “it’s the thirty-second year of the Glorious Empire” or whatever your dystopian regime calls itself.
Relative dates can also be used, such as “it’s been ten years since ascension of the Glorious Leader” or “the supervolcano blew twenty years ago.”
Admittedly, there’s not a lot one could have done about Back to the Future II. If teen Marty leaves the 1980s and arrives in a future where he’s in his forties, there’s a limited number of future years in which that story could take place. But Orwell and Clark could have left the numbers off.
Which isn’t to say that the book 1984 is any less of a cautionary tale just because the events it describes haven’t happened (yet, although the broligarchs certainly seem to be working on it). And the dates in the Space Odyssey series certainly don’t ruin our enjoyment of the stories. But those dates do create a kind of narrative speed bump, whereas their absence would go unnoticed.
Now I don’t make rules; I give recommendations. You can certainly set your story in a specific year if you want to. But my recommendation is to omit dates from science fiction if possible, to help your story be as timeless as possible.
