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Future Society, Present Values
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Many works set in the future presume that people in the future will have the same social mores and values as they do in the present, excepting a few superficial changes in order to facilitate the plot, demonstrate the foreignness/"futureness" of the setting, or satisfy Author Appeal. The assumption is that our future will be essentially the same as our present — bigger, smaller, sleeker, faster or more automated, but still recognizable as our world. For writers, it often involves Acceptable Breaks from Reality: it's a lot easier to observe the society you have than to predict which way it's going to go. Consequently the work is likely to appeal to a wider audience than a work which assumes the future will be foreign and puts in the appropriate amount of alien world-building. After all, who in the 25th century will be reading this anyway? (Presumably, the same sort of people who read books from the 17th century now...) Unfortunately, when authors do get the future wrong, it shows. Even if the technology is predicted perfectly, modern readers may lose Willing Suspension of Disbelief when reading a work written in The '50s, set in the present day, and assuming the attitudes of the present day will be exactly like those of the Fifties. They may even be severely bothered if a work from the Fifties assumes that attitudes in the far future will be just like those in the Fifties. (Even if the author had no way of knowing about The Beatles, even if it is the far future, it just seems wrong to read that a lover of popular music in the future goes primarily for jazz quartets or big bands, with not an electric guitar or synthesizer to be seen.) note This is even more unjustifiable because electric guitars did exist at the time, even though they were still a novelty. Sometimes the author will correctly predict some of the effects of a new technology, but completely miss others; many authors correctly foresaw the effect of automobiles on working habits and city design, but not one person foresaw the effect that access to automobiles would have on teen sexual activity. The most disturbing instances from our future point of view are those that miss more important social changes. To continue the '50s example, there are plenty of examples that failed to expect the civil rights movement. The schools may be futuristic and electronic, but they're still segregated. note Again, there were integrated schools at the time, at least in many urban areas, but these were not shown in works set either in the present or the future to avoid alienating Southern and Lower Midwestern audiences. The other two big changes that older works miss are greater gender equality (even on the space colonies, women Stay in the Kitchen) and the end of the Cold War (still wrangling with the Commies in the 22nd Century). To be sure, this is most significant when a work is actively trying to model a "normal" future, rather than a setting with a collapse into neo-feudalism or a dystopia or the like. Sometimes a writer addresses a contemporary social issue with a morality play set in the future, which naturally requires the social issue to still be a problem in that future. This trope will often apply to modern works set 20 Minutes into the Future as well. This is the social equivalent to Zeerust. The inverse of this, when the social mores of the present are presumed to apply in the past, is Politically Correct History. Related to Values Dissonance, Fair for Its Day, Science Marches On, Technology Marches On, Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale, and Failed Future Forecast. Eternal Prohibition, and Everybody Smokes are specific cases. Free-Love Future is a specific aversion of this. |
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"Little Lost Robot": Dr Calvin is questioning the last person to see the titular robot, and they are reluctant to repeat their exact words in front of a lady. Dr Calvin insists on precision, and the witness's superior offers to be the visual target of the Cluster F-Bomb repetition. A Narrative Profanity Filter is provided for the audience, but the superior is incensed at the language. Dr Calvin, to her credit, merely states that she knows what most of those words mean and suspects that the others are equally derogatory. In today's society, cursing out a random woman is much less offensive than cursing out your superior. | |
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In Frank Herbert's Dune (published 1965), the fact society has gone back to a kind of space feudalism sort of explains why Leto can't have more than one wife (thus preventing him from marrying the woman he actually loves, Jessica). However, when the powerful, feared, all-female psychic order of the Bene Gesserit exists, it really doesn't explain why teenage Paul the protagonist is brought into Leto's confidences, while Jessica—an adult, a highly skilled very badass Bene Gesserit, someone Leto trusts and loves completely and should have no reason to think can't handle the mess they're about to be in—is sidelined. Paul, mind you, is a prodigy with some pretty hefty superpowers himself (given the chance, he's actually stronger than his mother), so it's not that he shouldn't have been told, but the fact that he and Leto both unquestioningly exclude Jessica at first is very 60s. Incidentally, there is a justification for Leto being reluctant to share certain information with Jessica (the Atreides family's interests and those of the aforementioned Bene Gesserit do not fully coincide, and there's reasonable grounds to be concerned that she might be suffering from conflicted loyalties) but this is never directly stated to be the true reason. | |
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The Jetsons: This trope was the whole point of the show, since it was meant to be the future equivalent of The Flintstones. The fact that there were no real cultural differences despite being set a hundred years in the future was a big part of the show's humor. Jane Jetson was a typical 1950s housewife who didn't even know how to drivenote Women could legally drive, and had always been able to, but this was reflective of attitudes rather than the law... but they had flying cars! When she gets driving lessons, her instructor panics at the idea of a female student, then changes his "Student Driver" sign to read "Woman Student Driver: BEWARE". There was one episode George spent complaining about women drivers, with an unflatteringly portrayed female bus driver getting Played for Laughs. On the other hand, lots of jokes based on George complaining about his "button finger" (with the implication that what we are lazy about will just get more crazy in a world where you just push buttons all day) are Harsher in Hindsight due to increasing awareness of Repetitive Strain Injury. |
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The Lord of Opium: In the future, nations between Mexico and the US export drugs to other countries in exchange for patrolling the border between the two nations. One of the nations of the Dope Confederacy exports marijuana in the 22nd century. Seeing that the book came out in 2013, it's odd that a nation would need to make marijuana to export illegally, seeing that many nations at the time of the time of publication and at the time this entry is being written (April 2015) are relaxing marijuana laws or even outright legalizing it. | |
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RoboCop (1987): The newscast at the beginning of the film depicts South Africa as not only still under Apartheid, but embroiled in what seems like a civil war. The besieged city-state of Pretoria has armed themselves with a French-made Neutron Bomb and are willing to use it as their last line of defense. Three years after the film's release, the National Party began deconstructing the Apartheid system and transitioned to majority rule in 1994. | |
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The franchise, naturally, retconned this in Star Trek: Enterprise, introducing Erika Hernandez, a no-nonsense woman who had previously served with Archer, as the captain of the second Warp 5 starship (Columbia NX-02). In the 2000s, people were ready for that sort of thing. | |
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Parodied on Mad TV, with the Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon/Captain Video-esque "Rocket Revengers". The show— which took place in the far year of 1998—was a time 20 Minutes into the Future from the years the series was claimed to be made, between 1938 and 1941, and has those values parodied. Despite having a black man, Abraham Jefferson (played by Phil LaMarr) on the three-man team, he was constantly talked-over by the white leader of the team, Dutch Enderson. All three espoused purely White-American Christian values ("Thank the world's one God we all survived!") and smoking was a healthy method of taking in meals. The black people also lived on the separate but equal island of Antarctica, to which they had voluntarily moved. The main villain of the series was a Yellow Peril caricature called Tuca, Queen of the Chinese (played by a black actress in Yellowface) and the sole woman who aided the Rocket Revengers group, Betty (even though she was called Professor) was treated as little more than a secretary and lamented that Dutch didn't think she was pretty and she was unmarried. | |
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Many future-themed classic cartoons, from Looney Tunes to Tex Avery MGM Cartoons, fit this trope. In many instances, they even assume the dress styles of the era in which they were made will still be relevant in the future. | |
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The Complete Adventures of Lucky Starr: Despite being set far enough in the future to have Casual Interplanetary Travel, women are barely featured in the series (four of the books have no women at all) and certainly none are in positions of power. | |
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Atlas Shrugged Hank Rearden is blackmailed into signing away the rights to Rearden Metal because government officials have incriminating evidence of his extramarital affair with Dagny Taggart, a subplot that comes straight from the novel. In 1957, when the book was published, such an affair would've been considered a pretty big deal and might've irreparably damaged both his and Taggart's reputation. But since the movie places the story in 2016, the idea that such a thing would cause anything but a minor scandal—let alone convince Rearden to sign away his life's work, which he swore he would never do—just comes across as bizarre. Most of the fundamental economic philosophy espoused in the movie has gone from a potentially viable alternative to partially socialized economies to completely discredited empirically in the years since the book was written, too, and it shows. Most jarringly for viewers even slightly familiar with corporate practices is the idea that existing, successful companies would fail due to what amounts to one of the venture capitalists that funded the start-up bowing out. Not only does that not happen, but buying into companies early and cashing out once they've succeeded is how venture capitalists make their money; what happened to Rearden is the standard procedure for people in his position and is largely thought to benefit the capitalist more than anyone else. |
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All of Heinlein's work is prone to this. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, for instance, despite showcasing many cultural differences in the lunar society (not the least of which is ubiquitous polyamory) portrays gender issues much as a 1950s writer would be expected to think of a post-feminist world: touching women without their permission is a major societal taboo... but it is up to the woman's male friends or relatives to protect her, and women are still generally considered unintelligent (or at least irrational or illogical) and unfit for many positions. The main reason the culture's attitudes toward women have changed at all is that women are a substantial minority on Luna (a situation that is itself the result of the presumption of 1950s values.) The rival Earth society, where the sexes are still 50/50 in numbers, shows female nurses giggling at having their rears pinched, rather than filing sexual harassment lawsuits. | |
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Podkayne of Mars, set in the distant space-faring future, features a main character who would like to become the first ever female spaceship captain. The first instance of a woman (Eileen Collins) captaining a spaceship occurred in July 1999. The fact that Podkayne will face discrimination on account of her sex is clearly labelled unfair. Heinlein makes the same point in 'Rolling Stones' in which Hazel Stone is passed over for promotion on account of her sex. | |
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Terra Ignota very weirdly invokes this in its examination of gender in its far-future utopian setting. By the 2300s, gender equality has been achieved by abolishing the concept of gender; as part of this, everybody uses neutral pronouns and names and dresses in unisex clothing, with gender signifiers considered the realm of pornography. But Mycroft, the narrator, insists on assigning gender to everyone according to how stereotypically masculine/feminine they behave — in accordance to 1700s stereotypes of masculinity and femininity — as part of his insistence on interpreting the world through the lens of Enlightenment-era philosophy. Furthermore, it's quickly clear that the old gender stereotypes never really went away; they were just papered over without actually being addressed, and various characters deliberately cast themselves as stereotypes (such as the delicate, fragile woman who must be protected, or the seductive, domineering male outlaw) to manipulate others, and in a putatively nongendered world, nobody knows how to resist such manipulation, and so fall into stereotypes themselves. | |
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The Twilight Zone (1959): The episode "Two" is about two soldiers, one male and one female, from opposite sides being the last survivors of their war. The female soldier's combat uniform included a pleated skirt, and her only line is the Russian for "Pretty", referring to a dress in a store window. | |
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An in-universe example in the short story "Tomorrow Town": the 1970s protagonist is sent to investigate a murder within a utopian bubble-society. He notices the prevalence of somewhat old-fashioned gender roles, and figures it is due to the society being founded by a Golden Age science fiction writer who imposed his own 1950s social mores on his supposedly futuristic society. | |
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George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: O'Brien boldly proclaims that the system is going to stand forever (although the appendix at the end refers to their society in the past tense). In the heady 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, many proclaimed that inefficient dictatorships seemed doomed to be replaced by more enlightened regimes, avoiding the stagnant society of the novel... although considering democratic backsliding in places such as Russia, perhaps this bravado isn't so dated after all. The idea that a Forever War was a good way to maintain public support should've been discredited after World War I, and is even more laughable in the U.S. due to the Vietnam War and Iraq. It makes sense in Orwell's model where the people of the Soviet Union backed Stalin and his regime as a bulwark against Nazism, as did the Western Communists who Orwell saw as his real target, but of course in that situation, Stalin didn't have to make up any fake war, since the Nazis really did invade the USSR, and with unspeakable horrifying brutality moreover. |
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The Restaurant at the End of the Universe has the people in the Golgafrincham B-Ark — the joke being that all the jobs they do are useless, 'pointless' jobs — which have at least partially dated. While middle-management types and meddling marketers remain problems, people don't really look down on hairdressers as being 'pointless' any more (in the 1970s, it was just beginning to become socially acceptable for a man to go to a hairdresser's instead of a barber's, but it was still seen as very weird — nowadays men go to a hairdresser's as default, and viewing a service mostly of interest to women as pointless is seen as a bit misogynistic). Then there's the 'telephone sanitisers', who have ceased to exist along with the public telephones they service. | |
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The Handmaid's Tale: The series appears to have done away with the blatant white supremacy in Gilead as described in the novel where, not only did they want babies, the goal was white babies, with black people being "removed to North Dakota" (quite possibly getting killed there). In the novel, Moira was white, while African-American actress Samira Wiley plays her in the series. We see some photos of black Commanders and Wives in the clinic. No one thinks anything is odd when Moira impersonates an Aunt, either. There are some black men among the Guardians and common workers too. There are some Commanders and Wives who do explicitly want white babies (Aunt Lydia mentions a couple who explicitly requested not to have a Handmaid of color) but it's less institutionalized than in the novel. The series also so far removes the criticism of radical feminists present in the original book. In the book, Offred's mother was a radical second-wave feminist who believed that all men were sexist and that pornography should be banned. In the feminist community, there was fierce debate about that point of view, however, nowadays it's more of a fringe belief. Additionally, since the series received a Setting Update to the 21st century, it wouldn't make sense temporally for Offred's mother to be a second-wave feminist (since the second wave started in the 60s, and at this point Offred's mother could've been born in the early 60snote Her actress, Cherry Jones, was born in 1956.). When she's finally introduced in season 2, she is a feminist (who takes Offred to feminist rallies as a child), but not an extremist like her book counterpart. Serena Joy's pre-Gilead profession is changed from ultra-conservative televangelist to Blonde Republican Sex Kitten political pundit/author (in the vein of Tomi Lahren or Ann Coulter), reflecting the decline in the relevance of televangelism during the 2010s. |
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Stranger in a Strange Land: Although far from a free love utopia, open relationships are considerably more acceptable today than they were in Heinlein's time, as well as homosexuality. Women are also generally not secretaries and "girls" who enjoy being patronized. | |
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Averting this is specifically one of the reasons why A Clockwork Orange uses a new brand of slang created from scratch coupled with an alien, otherworldly future with very different values (to begin with: bars that instead of booze serve milk laced with narcotics) — if Anthony Burgess's rendition of 1962's 20 Minutes into the Future were based on what was actually going on in 1962, the book and its film would have aged pretty poorly. | |
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Books like Make Room! Make Room! and Logan's Run used the concern over overpopulation at the time as fodder for dystopian horror, as a future society is portrayed as facing extinction or resorting to draconian measures against it). While concern exists, it's slightly odd now that contraception is almost never even mentioned in books like this, let alone abortion-probably because both were very controversial (and also illegal) in much of the West at the time. Obviously there's still opposition to them, but they became common enough that in the West, underpopulation is a concern in some countries rather than overpopulation and make these look very odd to a modern reader. Even the notorious One-Child Policy of China stopped mostly in fear that they had gone too far, and the country faced a demographic crisis. Of course, this is not the only factor in lower population, but it's definitely there. | |
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This is particularly bad in Speaker for the Dead and its sequel, Xenocide, where a lot of the plot points are being derived from Card's assumption that Brazilian society (the basis for the location of the book) would remain as conservative and Catholic as it was when he traveled there for his missionary mission. | |
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The Fallout series deconstructs this by parodying 50s sci-fi that played it straight. In the series’ Alternate History, the Berlin Wall never fell, and China remained staunchly communist for roughly a century longer than it did in real life, while American culture, gender roles and politics barely changed in that time either. But when the oil that fueled prosperity finally started running out, America started Putting on the Reich and invaded Canada to prevent itself from simply imploding because it had never learned to evolve or adapt, and the world was almost destroyed when Cold War politics combined with modern resource scarcity. | |
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"The Ugly Little Boy": The lack of any ethics, or any requirement for ethical approval, is shocking—especially given that ethical treatment of research subjects was a very hot topic (due to the disclosures of Nazi experimentation on concentration camp victims just 13 years before the story was written). | |
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Heinlein's short story —All You Zombies— features a sex-segregated future in which astronauts and space pilots are always male, and the spaceship stewardess/prostitutes in skimpy outfits are all female. Written not long after WWII, the story fails to anticipate that the horrifying events of that war would lead to very strict legislation about medical procedures and informed consent. His central character is placed under general anesthesia — and wakes to be informed, after the fact, that they have been subjected without consent to sex change surgery. In our world such a character would not be relegated to a hand-to-mouth living writing confession stories, because they would sue the hospital and doctor into bankruptcy. | |
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In Space Cadet (Heinlein), the Patrol, which the main characters belong to, is exclusively male. | |
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While the vast majority of Red vs. Blue has aged rather well, many jokes/aspects of the earlier seasons definitely wouldn't fly if they had came out today and not in the 2000s and early 2010s. The Blood Gulch Chronicles probably gets this the worst, as the various examples of Innocently Insensitive Unfortunate Implications during its eventsnote I.e., the usage of "retard" (which is now seen as an offensive slur against the mentally disabled) in casual parlance, the uncomfortably common homophobia and misogyny displayed in jokes from as "recent" as Recreation, Sister being written only as a "loud slut" until The Shisno Paradox, and Donut's entire character being pretty much one big Gay Panic joke until (arguably) The Project Freelancer Saga would all have gotten a noticeable backlash if they were to have been first released in years later. Though to Rooster Teeth's credit, the series has actually adapted relatively well to the times by taking these criticisms into account, with it in turn focusing on having more politically correct humor as the series has gone on while either removing the series' more problematic elements or giving them a suitable Revision/Rewrite.note I.e., Church and Tex's Star-Crossed Lovers status/Belligerent Sexual Tension from during The Blood Gulch Chronicles is re-framed in The Project Freelancer Saga as the genuinely toxic and mutually destructive romance it really is, Tucker gets called out on his increasingly Jerkass behavior and toxic masculinity by Kaikaina during The Shisno Paradox (with him even eventually taking a noticeable level in kindness during the events of Singularity), and Donut's Ambiguously Gay characteristics get increasingly downplayed with more focus given instead to his status as The Ditz of Red Team along with his Naïve Newcomer and Granola Girl qualities. | |
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Foundation Series: The scope of this series is epic, but The Foundation Trilogy uses gender roles practically identical to 1950s United States. When Dr Asimov revisited the series decades later, he included women more prominently, especially in the form of Mayor Harla Branno, his first female mayor. She is an Iron Lady ruler for Terminus and the Foundation, introduced in Foundation's Edge (1982), and wants to conquer the galaxy centuries earlier than the Seldon Plan expects. However, Dr Asimov is clearly more comfortable writing male characters, despite continuing to add badass females like Dors Venabili and Bliss. | |
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Zigzagged in his teen novel Tunnel in the Sky. On the one hand, women make up their own (separate) military units and make up half the survival-course students in the story; on the other, sexual mores are such that a bunch of teenagers, isolated from their parents and all forms of authority, take time to stage their own marriage ceremonies in the middle of a hostile wilderness before daring to fool around. When the protagonist gets home, his parents' attitude is that of people who fully expect him to let them pick his friends for him. Oh, and when his military sister opts to get married, she has to leave the corps. | |
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Star Trek: The Original Series tried to avert this. On one hand, they had minorities and women in Starfleet, which was progressive for the '60s, and no one smoking.note Gene Roddenberry was so adamant about this last example that he was reportedly very upset when a "No smoking" sign appeared on the Enterprise bridge in one film, and Capt. Kirk was shown smoking something that resembled a joint in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. But the women, although never explicitly told to Stay in the Kitchen, were often portrayed as damsels in distress or as only joining the space service to find a husband. In short they did their best to avert the trope but couldn't due to Executive Meddling, especially in the pilot (see below). In the episode "The Enemy Within", evil!Kirk tries to rape Yeoman Rand. She later recounts the incident for good!Kirk, Spock and McCoy, displaying a very '60s attitude about it ("I don't want to get you into trouble. I wouldn't even have mentioned it.") while being in tears. And this is while she is unaware that there are two Kirks running around! Probably the worst example was in "Turnabout Intruder", the last episode of the original series. Written by Gene Roddenberry himself, it reveals that women aren't allowed to be captains in Starfleet, in the 23rd century. A female character who tries to get around this rule by using alien technology to switch bodies with Kirk is portrayed as being a horribly misguided fanatic. The franchise, naturally, retconned this in Star Trek: Enterprise, introducing Erika Hernandez, a no-nonsense woman who had previously served with Archer, as the captain of the second Warp 5 starship (Columbia NX-02). In the 2000s, people were ready for that sort of thing. There is the possibility (lampshaded by McCoy) that the woman in question was mentally ill to begin with, and thus may not have interpreted regulations with the right frame of mind. Leonard Nimoy hated this episode, and confirmed that Roddenberry really meant for Starfleet to have such a rule: females could not captain a starship. Later biographers blame Creator Breakdown, as Roddenberry was going through his divorce during this time. Since the episode aired, the franchise and fans have handwaved the "no female captains" implication by playing Exact Words and suggesting the character's actual line, about the world of Starfleet captains not including women, refers to the fact that captains are "married to their ship" and don't give themselves over to romantic temptation. Certainly, the two prequel series Star Trek: Enterprise and Star Trek: Discovery, the latter set only about a decade before TOS, support this rationalization as both feature female captains. The original pilot of the series included a female first officer. She capably commanded the Enterprise for most of the episode while the (male) captain was held captive by aliens. In fact, she was the one who dispassionately decided that letting the aliens breed humans for slavery would be unacceptable, when Captain Pike seemed willing to let it happen as part of a bargain to save the Enterprise. Number One coldly threatened to blow everyone up — including herself — instead, and this was what finally convinced the aliens to abandon their plot and let everyone go. If only they let Roddenberry keep that character in the show, it would have been an amazing aversion of this trope... but the pilot's test audiences failed to react well, and Roddenberry pissed off the network by casting his girlfriend in the role. The network also didn't like the idea of the Enterprise having a 50-50 gender split. Eliminating Number One and reducing the percentage of women were two compromises Roddenberry made, allegedly in part so that he could keep the character of Spock. (Pike and Number One did eventually get their own series, about fifty-five years later.) "Plato's Stepchildren" is credited as having the very first (obvious, anyway) interracial kiss on US television. According to some accounts, it very, very nearly fell prey to those meddlesome executives, and was finally only allowed through when it was demonstrated that neither party involved really wanted to do it, but were being forced by alien mind control. The studio was horribly afraid they were going to be inundated with hate mail, that the country would be in an uproar over such an act and simply couldn't accept it; they got a ton of letters alright, with a distinct majority praising the scene. Nichelle Nichols even recounts reading a letter from a Southern man, who was "totally against the mixing of the races. However, any time a red-blooded American boy like Captain Kirk gets a beautiful dame in his arms that looks like Uhura, he ain't gonna fight it." Now THAT'S progress. Plus, William Shatner and Nichols were adamant about keeping the kiss (which if you've read either of their autobiographies seems to be the only thing they ever agreed on), and deliberately screwed up every take of Kirk and Uhura not kissing, so the editors were forced to use a shot where they did. Star Trek: The Animated Series (made only a few years after TOS) had an episode featuring Uhura in command after the male crew members of the Enterprise are incapacitated. A Moment of Awesome for early Star Trek in general and Uhura in particular! In "Who Mourns for Adonais?" it appears that Scotty will soon be marrying a female crew member, causing Kirk and McCoy to lament the loss of such a skilled crewman, because she'll be giving up her job once she ties the knot. Oddly enough, this comes a season after "Balance of Terror" featured a marriage between two crew members where this attitude was completely absent.note Although as the two crew members worked in the same department - Phaser Control - and she worked directly underneath him, it was implied that this state of affairs couldn't continue after they were married, which is standard practice in many firms even today. And the episode doesn't suggest she would be leaving Starfleet altogether. On another note, the franchise's depiction of Earth as a One World Order is becoming less and less likely given both deteriorating/fluctuating international and intranational relations, as well as the renewed focus on racial and/or ethnic identity in the developed world. Many on both the political left and right today would balk (for very different reasons) at the sheer amount of cultural erasure needed to make such an arrangement even remotely feasible. This was something even the writers themselves could see was problematic as early as TNG, with the Borg being partly written as a grim parody of the Federation's assimilationist values taken to their logical conclusion. |
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In Little Fuzzy and sequels, it's downplayed. Everybody Smokes centuries in the future (the book was released prior to widespread knowledge of smoking being harmful) along with drinking. It's portrayed as mildly charming how the fuzzies (another sapient species) are introduced to smoking pipes by Jack. Granted, centuries on from now medicine might have advanced enough to make smoking no longer dangerous. Only one main character is a woman. Nearly all people in top positions are men. Even she echoes the then-current custom of thinking about herself as the future Mrs. Husband's Name after they're engaged. In fairness though she's also a psychologist and navy officer whose credentials never have the slightest question about them, nor is she treated any differently than men otherwise. |
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Futurama takes place in the far-off year of 3000, but the world is socially and culturally pretty identical to how they were in the early 2000s of the show's production, just with a whole universe to explore and futuristic technology to use. This was the point of the show — rather than trying to paint an accurate picture of the future, it's mainly using the utopian and dystopian ideals of what Science Fiction largely predicted to be the future as a vessel to satirize the culture of today, illustrating that even with spaceships and robots and aliens, people will mostly remain just as bumbling and average as we've always been. Even still, some of the attitudes are dated to the 2000s, to the point they adapt to the real-life changing times as the series continues to air — while society is typically depicted as heteronormative, with things like polyamory and gay marriage occasionally being depicted as controversial in episodes like "A Taste of Freedom," the post-revival episode "Proposition Infinity" makes a point that gay marriage is uncontroversially accepted in the 31st century (though robosexual marriage is not). | |
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Jonathan Ingram at one point during Policenauts can comment on a strip club that employs transgender "biovestites", which he's quite dismissive of, labeling them "so-called women" and states that 2037 Los Angeles is "unfortunately" famous for this sort of thing. While one could excuse these attitudes as Deliberate Values Dissonance due to him being a Fish out of Temporal Water, the incident that saw him get cryogenically frozen happened in 2013, and plenty of people from that year would find such opinions horribly bigoted. | |
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Forbidden Planet: The film opens with a monologue describing how by the twenty-first century men and women are reaching out into space, implying a certain degree of equality... and the first thing we cut to is a massive space expedition crew made up of white American men. Many of said men also display a very clear 1950s attitude when interacting with Alta, the one female character in the movie. One scene involves her being told to "cover herself" (since up until that point she was wearing skimpy outfits and getting the crew sexually aroused), and has Robby the Robot make her a new dress... since just wearing a pair of pants is unthinkable. |
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Wonder Woman (1975): In "Time Bomb", Cassandra Loren, despite being from the enlightened year of 2155, bases her entire plan on convincing men to believe her future knowledge by seduction rather than using that knowledge to execute her plan herself. | |
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The fourth book of The Helmsman Saga has Wilf Brim amazed at a woman from another culture having a completely shaved pubic area, something he states he never encountered earlier. When the book was written in 1991, that might have been unusual. When it was rewritten 20 years later... well, the scene was cut down considerably. | |
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Parodied and subverted in Garth Marenghis Darkplace. The writing in the So Bad, It's Good Show Within a Show is astoundingly chauvinistic and racist, making it seem like a prime case of Values Dissonance from the 60s or so. Except the show was made in the late 80s long after such attitudes had been discredited; Garth Marenghi is just that much of a bigot. It's implied that this contributed heavily to Darkplace getting cancelled. | |
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Eclipse Phase offers a rather unusual case. There's an in-universe "faction" (if they may be called so) collectively known as Anons. Yes, the Image Boards kind — or, more accurately, a future incarnation of 4chan's anons. The game depicts them in a mildly favourable light, as whistleblowers and vigilante social gadflies striking against stuffy establishment figures. Had this depiction been developed in the era of "memeing for Trump", one figures we'd see them presented as wannabe Black Shirts for the Jovians or even worse. Of course, this is only a few years' worth of difference as opposed to most of the examples on this page, so the jury may be still out on whether the sudden anti-liberal turn of the Internet Jerk is a long-term development. | |
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Modern readers of Walter Miller's post-apocalyptic classic A Canticle for Leibowitz may find some of the future Catholic dogmas to be a bit...antiquated. This is due to the novel being written just a few years before Vatican II, and thus including none of its changes. | |
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George Pal's 1955 film Conquest of Space made some interesting technological predictions, including a concept for a spaceship with principles vaguely reminiscent of the space shuttle. There is even a bit of Fair for Its Day in that there is some racial equality so far as the one Japanese crew member being treated with respect by the otherwise white cast. What the film got wrong was assuming the U.S. space program would still be run by the military.note Initially experiments in rocketry were conducted by both the army and the navy. The problem (which the filmmakers were probably not aware of in 1955) was that both were wasting money and resources competing against each other and refusing to share. The government eventually got fed up with it and instead put together the civilian organization of NASA. Also women Stay in the Kitchen back on Earth while the men are the ones who get to go into space. In other words, according to this film, female astronauts don't exist, which may be especially jarring to a modern viewer in light of a certain more recent critically acclaimed film centered around a female astronaut. In addition, the Captain of the ship comes to think of the mission as sacrilegious, with Mankind's presence in God's perfect heavens being an insult to the almighty. This was actually a real movement that flourished very briefly when the idea of space travel was first mooted as a serious possibility. By the time the movie came out the philosophy was rapidly dying out, and the launch of Sputnik a couple of years later washed the remnants away completely. To modern audiences it just looks like a delusional symptom of the man going insane. | |
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The Puppet Masters was published in 1951 and set in 2007. Although the heroine is just as tough and capable as the male lead (sometimes more so), the moment gender roles or romantic relationships come up she turns, hilariously, into June Cleaver. | |
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"Feminine Intuition": The designers of a subtly feminine-looking robot believe that everyone will assume it is mentally inferior to other robots. One character explicitly states that if there's anything the average person believes, it's that women are less intelligent than men. Upon saying this, he nervously glances around (Dr Susan Calvin having recently retired). At the end, after Dr Calvin comes back to save the day, the lesson is that men dismiss women's equal (if not superior) intelligence as mere "intuition". | |
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Star Trek: The Animated Series (made only a few years after TOS) had an episode featuring Uhura in command after the male crew members of the Enterprise are incapacitated. A Moment of Awesome for early Star Trek in general and Uhura in particular! | |
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The antagonist factions in Atlas Shrugged are strawmen anyway (the writer doesn't distinguish between anyone on the political spectrum who's not fully ideologically aligned with her heroes), but many of their social views, especially Balph Eubank, a popular "progressive" philosopher, espousing Stay in the Kitchen, would not be tolerated in a modern left-wing organization, being rather anti-modernistic and anti-woman. | |
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War of the Worlds (2005) has this in the very first spoken line of dialogue. The original novel, which was published in 1898, began with the words, "No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own." In 1898, it was likely most people would agree with that statement. In the 2005 film, wanting to tie in the film with the book, the writers had the narrator say the same line, only updated: "No one would have believed in the early years of the 21st century, that our world was being watched by intelligences greater than our own." Even a rudimentary Google search will show just how many people actually do believe just that. Indeed, humans have been looking for alien intelligences since the 1970s ourselves. Many believe they're already here. | |
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Men, Martians and Machines. According to Sarge all doctors aboard spaceships are black because "for reasons not understood, no Negro had ever suffered space sickness." This portrayal is Fair for Its Day in that a black person in a position of authority in a white-dominated society was remarkable in itself, and for the idea of having a multi-racial crew due to different races being good at different things. White Terrestrials are good at engines, Black Terrestrials don't suffer space sickness, Martians can work in low pressure environments and concentrate on multiple tasks simultaneously, the android Jay Score can handle extreme conditions. The theme of the book is that by working together, all these diverse races can handle any crisis. Consider that this book was published in 1955 when Humans Are White was the more common trope. Where it still falls into this trope is that the crew is entirely male. | |
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The Demolished Man: Despite the characters' stated disconnect from the 20th century, the book is pretty emblematic of the time it was written in respect to gender roles, although Ms. Wyg¬e Yes, her name has an ampersand in it. clearly has an active sex life which is only complained about when she distracts undercover cops. On the other hand, there is a scene where a black applicant is accepted into the Esper's Guild on account of his latent talent, which suggests that at least their group is meritocratic. Also, the president of the Guild is Asian. | |
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Spacer women manage to discover careers in sciences and politics as easily as the men do, because of their post-scarcity societies and the fact that robot servants handle all domestic tasks, including raising children. Thus, Spacer women would have nothing to do with themselves if they didn't have careers. That said, the social culture of Spacer men and women don't appear integrated because Detective Baley encounters so few. In The Robots of Dawn, Dr. Fastolfe has a wife, she's dismissed during the events of the novel. His daughter is also a roboticist like him, but as with most Spacer scientists, she is a borderline misanthrope. | |
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The Caves of Steel: The robot series does a pretty good job of portraying future Earth's culture realistically, but there are some hints that give away its age. Elijah's son, Bentley, uses language so stereotypical of The '50s that it may sound closer to parody to modern readers. Corporal punishment for reprimanding children is considered a routine occurrence thousands of years in the future. The sequel, The Naked Sun, even has a lengthy discussion on how difficult but necessary it is programming a Three Laws-Compliant robot to understand why spanking a child performs a greater good for their future development than failing to administer any punishment. The role of women on Earth is also extremely vague. Because resource-starved Earth cannot afford amenities, most people live in tiny apartments which do not have kitchens, eat in communal cafeterias, and have small families due to Population Control. These factors make the role of a Housewife largely redundant, yet Detective Baley interacts with virtually no women besides his wife, making law enforcement and government as male-dominated as they were in the real-world 1950s. The Robots of Dawn, written 30 years later in 1983, does introduce a female official and mentions policewomen, stating that the novels merely occur at a time women seldom choose these career paths. Spacer women manage to discover careers in sciences and politics as easily as the men do, because of their post-scarcity societies and the fact that robot servants handle all domestic tasks, including raising children. Thus, Spacer women would have nothing to do with themselves if they didn't have careers. That said, the social culture of Spacer men and women don't appear integrated because Detective Baley encounters so few. In The Robots of Dawn, Dr. Fastolfe has a wife, she's dismissed during the events of the novel. His daughter is also a roboticist like him, but as with most Spacer scientists, she is a borderline misanthrope. |
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Published in 1959, Alas, Babylon portrays breastfeeding and home canning as relics which have all but disappeared prior to the nuclear strike depicted in the book, but which must be reluctantly revived in the conditions prevailing afterward. Both practices have made a strong comeback since the 1950s. | |
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Corporal punishment for reprimanding children is considered a routine occurrence thousands of years in the future. The sequel, The Naked Sun, even has a lengthy discussion on how difficult but necessary it is programming a Three Laws-Compliant robot to understand why spanking a child performs a greater good for their future development than failing to administer any punishment. | |
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Space 1889 has an alternate history version: Mankind achieves space travel in 1870, meets other intelligent species and gets access to material that makes flying ships possible — with all other things being the same, including society. The discovery of other intelligent species, for instance, has almost no effect on human society, and European colonists treat the new planets as new places to explore, trade with and colonize, and Martians and lizard men as just a new form of natives. Player characters are supposed to generally embody Victorian society and values; the players disagree with much of these. The in-game society is justifiably old-fashioned since it is actually set in an alternative past. | |
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Heinlein often averted this trope as well. He frequently cast non-whites and people of mixed-race as protagonists in his works despite writing before the American Civil Rights era. Races were equal in his world, while the sexes tended to be different but enjoyed de facto legal equality. Readers of his era were not used to seeing a mixed-race or non-white protagonist. In his most famous work, Starship Troopers, the main character is Filipino, with most major characters also being non-American, and usually non-white. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress continues this, with Manny being mixed race, and part of a polygamous mixed race marriage, which gets him thrown into jail when visiting the South. Further, Podkayne of Mars has Podkayne see only her sex as an issue with becoming a captain. The fact she's black doesn't rate a concern. | |
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