Sam Raimi's World War 3 and the History of Science Fiction

Originally posted on March 5, 2016.

Recently I wrote about the possibility that science fiction--real, hardcore, idea-based science fiction, science fiction as H.G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback and John Campbell knew it, rather than science fiction as just some fuzzy category containing anything that smells even slightly speculative--was in decline, and that this was in part because its place in contemporary culture was being taken up by other things that performed the task as well--or in respects, even better.

These included pop science, pop technology and of course pop futurology. The last of these seems of particular importance. Today someone looking to speculate about the future, to provide a scenario in which the world is different, not only has the option of doing so by way of nonfiction (one not around when, for example, Edward Bellamy was writing, or Wells was starting out, and still comparatively limited in Campbell's heyday), but can perhaps do so more fully and effectively in that way than if they were obliged to work their ideas into a work of fiction. They can devote their full attention to working out what tomorrow might be like, in the large and the small, and how it came to be that way, rather than their trying to force it all into the background of some character's narrative (and being scorned by ever more literature-minded critics for the extent to which they raised such non-Jamesian matters at all).

That a director of Sam Raimi's stature has thought it commercially viable to take a work of futurology and make a major feature film out of it--in this case, George Friedman's The Next 100 Years (reviewed here)--would seem to be suggestive of the long-running trend. The actual film, of course, can be expected to be a work of fiction, with characters and so on, but the point is that rather than taking some novel and adapting that, the starting point has been a work of futurology.