I know some of us, if we are nerds, got a little verklempt in 2019 when we realized
Blade Runner took place in 2019, and in 2015 because of
Back to the Future II, and so on. Some disappointment; some relief. So maybe people are wondering what kind of inaccurate future is in store for us this year. You have a choice! Possibly the most recent 2021 is from the 1992 novel
Children of Men (the movie moved it ahead a little); the most famous is
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (so
Blade Runner was a rare case of an adaptation picking an even more unrealistically early future).
But a lesser-known 2021 is the year of the earliest scenes in Thomas M. Disch's Vietnam War-era story cycle/novel
334, one of my all-time favorite books by a unique and sometimes maddening writer. This is a slice-of-life thing about a dozen major characters just dealing with life in New York City over several years in the 2020s, which is kind of crappy in many ways, and science-fictional in two or three ways, and ordinary otherwise. The prose is graceful and surprising, even though a large section of it was structured as a kind of writing game, where the narrative was required to change focus in just one of three ways from one scene to the next. It's an often bitter satire that seems to read pretty differently for different people—some take it as a totally cynical bummer, I don't really. I spent a while writing up
annotations because there are a lot of little side things in it I enjoy, and as usual time has put some of it in a different light: for instance, the idea that you could pretty easily see
53 different movies over several weeks
in theaters was not a misguided futuristic notion, it was an entirely realistic description of 1972 New York and a thing you could do well into the '90s when I lived there (and some of his fictional films have since been made, for better or for worse).
Anyway, there's a bit in it that always makes me a little weepy, where this pissed-off family is watching a TV movie based on Walt Whitman's life and work, which sounds simultaneously super-cheesy and maybe a little cool. The movie throws in some lines from
"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry", where Whitman is trying to imagine people of the future and he decides they'll be doing a lot of the same stuff, going around New York, seeing things and having problems, and he loves that so much. "What is it, then, between us? What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?" The narrator doesn't dig the movie at all, and that kind of lofty earnestness isn't the book's usual style; but you can tell Disch does like these people, not because they're necessarily nice or smart or making him hopeful about the future, but just because they're managing to get by.
There's a less sympathetic character, a jaded social services manager with a bad case of affluenza, who is into a sort of drug-assisted historical LARPing. In the game, she's chosen to be a 4th-century Roman matron—because she thinks of her real world as being on the way out, just like the Roman Empire. It's written such that you can see how it'd be tempting to think that way, but also how it can be a self-indulgent luxury, a way of reassuring yourself that all the things that bother you will surely be destroyed soon. It's the mean flip side of Whitman's empathy: I identify with you, people of the past, because you're doomed and unworthy like me, and because nothing either of us does matters!
This novel (in its collected form at least) is pretty much the same age I am. I was a science-fiction-crazed kid, but my own ideas about the future were usually pretty vague. If as a kid in the '80s I'd been able to hear from my future self how 2021 looks right now, it would've been a mixed bag for sure: pretty scary in some ways, frustrating in many, and a nice surprise in a few—a similar mix to the style of
334, and unfamiliar to about the same degree that that world would be from either the real present or the past. Past-me wouldn't have known what to say, but I would've wished us all the best.
Making up stories about the future, especially one you could theoretically live to see (even though Disch didn't), is like placing a marker to get the future's attention: remember here I was thinking about you, hoping you're carrying on, give me a nod back when you get there.
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