Come With Me If You Want to Live

Book excerpt: If our near future sometimes feels like a dystopian sci-fi movie, that’s because it is. In Come With Me If You Want to Live: The Future as Foretold in Classic Sci-Fi Films, Michael Harris reveals the hidden-in-plain-sight meanings of the greatest science fiction films of the past fifty years, the ways in which they predicted the future that we are increasingly living in, but how we can still avoid the worst of what they warned us about. The 1970s saw the start of a new wave of science fiction that predicted environmental destruction, out-of-control technology, and escalating political crises. These were not the fantastical imaginings of filmmakers, they were based on rising environmental consciousness and solid scientific research. The explanation of why we didn’t heed these warnings might be the most important story of our time – and now our future. Each chapter focuses on a classic sci-fi film: among them Blade Runner, Terminator 2, 12 Monkeys, Brazil, , Soylent Green, and the Back to the Future series; these films are used to consider our likely environmental, technological, and political future. But taking sci-fi seriously again could help us to regain our power to create different tomorrows guided by practical utopianism, and to imagine new science fictions for a better world. If you’re wondering what the future holds, maybe you’ve already seen it.