"My God! It's the future! My parents, my co-workers, my girlfriend...I'll never see any of them again... Yahoo!"
The Future, Conan?
— Various guests, Late Night With Conan O'Brien
All
Wiki Words are capitalized, but pretend that
The
Future is
even more capitalized. Also,
We Will Not Use An Index In The Future.
The Future is typically 200-1000 years after the present time, but there is no real upper limit (as evidenced by
Red Dwarf, which is set three
million years away).
The Future differs from
A Long Time Ago In A Galaxy Far Far Away by the presence of Earth—whether the show is set in San Francisco or whether Earth is a distant legend, there are always ties to Earth that make it significant in the show.
Note that most books of advice to aspiring authors insist that
Space Opera should be set at least several
thousand years in the future, based on just how much civilization would have to develop to make such things possible, but TV shows rarely go anything like that far ahead, partly to justify showing an Earth-based society that isn't so radically different that the viewers can't relate at all, but mostly because
Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale. A relatively near-future
Space Opera setting can be justified by having ancient civilisations already out in space and humanity a relative newcomer to the galactic stage, which has the bonus of being able to fit in
Expospeak as aliens explain what's going on to the ignorant human barbarians.
The Future is where much of "hard" science fiction takes place. The various
Star Treks are set here, as are
Babylon 5,
Buck Rogers In The 25th Century,
Firefly, you name it.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
Comic Books
- In the DC Universe, The Legion Of Super Heroes live 1000 years in The Future of The DCU.
- In the DC Comics Crisis Crossover DC One Million, half of the story takes place in the 853rd century (farther into the future than any other previous DC story, not counting the ones involving the End of Time). A highly detailed setting was created for this in which the entire solar system has gotten terraformed into Earthlike worlds, the whole human race has telepathic access to the Internet, and most amazing of all, descendants of DC's greatest heroes are STILL active!
Film
- Idiocracy undermines the popular ideas about the future. Life does not get more advanced and better, nor do we have an After The End scenario. Instead, after selective breeding for stupidity has caused The Future to be actually much worse than the present, but not in a Mad Max way. The idea came the '50's short story "The Marching Morons" by C.M. Kornbluth, which did not receive a credit.
Literature
- Isaac Asimov's Empire-Foundation novels take place in a galactic civilization so old that concepts like the laws of thermodynamics are considered to be "prehistoric" in origin. The origin of the human species is unknown; characters speculate on what part of the galaxy the oldest settlements are in, and some scientists propose that humans evolved independently on thousands of different worlds. Earth does eventually turn out to be the home of the human race, but this never becomes common knowledge.
- David Brin's Uplift series features elements of the Stupid Newbie Humans version of 'near-future' (within this millennium) space opera.
Live Action TV
- Firefly took place in the early 26th century (a fact not mentioned onscreen) in which Earth (known to everyone as Earth That Was) was stripped of all resources, leaving mass exodus planets to terraformed planets outside the solar system.
- Star Trek of course, where Humans Are Special— so special in fact that they've created the United Federation of Planets with Earth as the capital planet which (as far as the residents of the federation are concerned) is a near perfect society.
- Doctor Who has frequently delved into Earth's future, all the way to a hundred trillion years on, during which time the universe faces imminent collapse. It tends to show it as fairly or sometimes decidely Dystopian. (With Whoniverse not exactly set into stone, though, the series has shown some fairly contradictory visions of the future which include two contradictory accounts of Earth's ultimate destruction. For the record, it supposedly happens in seven million years time. Though other stories place it at five billion years from now.) Torchwood regular and Who expatriate Captain Jack Harkness comes from approximately the year 5000.
- Retconned by the presence of the Time War. Apparently it caused a lot of really, really screwy stuff to happen to the timeline.
Tabletop Games
Video Games
Web Comics
Web Original
- The Orions Arm universe is set over ten thousand years into the future. The intervening years are covered in the timeline in a fair amount of detail, and Earth is more or less a wildlife preserve/ historical landmark.
- The League Of Intergalactic Cosmic Champions was set here.
Western Animation
- Futurama takes place in the year 3000. New York is in ruins (with a new city, called New New York, built over it), a destroyed pizzeria is part of a museum display, talking heads reside in jars, the Internet is an actual world, robots run on alcohol, and killing oneself is as easy as going to a suicide machine, among others. Interestingly, Fry seems to settle in The Future easily enough.
