The Future Is Not What It Used to Be
On yesterday’s bright Sunday, when the clocks struck thirteen, H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds was televised on the BBC. Many people will know the legendary tale of aliens and mass destruction from Tom Cruise’s erratic sprinting across screens in 2005. However, it was Orson Welles’ infamous radio broadcast of his version of the novel in 1938 which convinced the US public that America was being invaded by supernatural forces. The BBC have timed their reboot perfectly: November 2019 is the month and year in which Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic Blade Runner is set. Short of flying cars and, well, replicants, we’re pretty much there. Google some photos of The Bund in Shanghai to see that we’re a hop skip and a climatic jump (of 2° C)to pretty much what Ridley Scott envisaged (although with a less stunning colour palette).
News of the BBC remake made me wonder if people would believe such a hoax today, as they did in 1938. And then I realised that an equivalent broadcast would fall on deaf ears. We are living in such an apocalyptic world, where climate change deniers rub shoulders with boiled-egg-brandishing commuters, that an alien invasion would be a damp squib. Wells would be devastated to learn that metal caskets from outer space exhuming themselves from the earth would be a rather welcome distraction from Brexit, Emma Watson’s self-partnering and the president posting photoshopped dogs on his twitter feed.
The trailer, the hordes of actors running across the screen - mud sodden, fear and anguish in their eyes - strikes me as a scene from a farmer’s market where middle-class families grapple for the last organic avocado. There are many things in 2019 which I think are more unbelievable than an alien invasion, and the deific status of fruit consumed at brunch is just one of them.
In this brave new world, sugar is our soma. Almost 30% of the UK population is now obese, as we now enter the hazardous seasonal months where companies vie for customers’ attention with bigger, more sugary treats. Greggs have responded gravely to the current health crisis by encouraging customers to try their ‘diet donut’ – a thing which really does seem to be the workings of outer-space, although sticky with artificial sugar and rainbow sprinkles rather than alien goop. It is beyond me how, in the same cake-crumbed incredulous breath, diet-donuts can be verified, and climate change denied. These are not mutually exclusive things, but the excess of sugar seems to be causing brains to disintegrate. Take for example Trump, who has ‘edited’ policies as he would delete a tweet, like a pizza order he no longer fancies.
In 2019 The Twilight Zone is no longer just a T.V. show warning of a shadowy future, but a living reality. We are double-parked on an infinite infernal highway to the end of civilisation, yet avoid the knowledge by plugging into podcasts as if they were IVF drips. Clothes materialize from our screens to our doors at rates faster than the deforestation of the Amazon. Forest fires are ripping across Australia. Venice is underwater - just (and almost as laughably) as the US is beginning withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. England lost the Rugby World Cup. You’d be forgiven for thinking the world was already in flames – and yet the cost to live upon this crumbling planet is as high as ever. With air-pollution causing health problems which place more strain on the NHS, in 2019 it literally costs to breathe.
So it seems that if aliens invaded in 2019, they would be rather nonplussed. They could carry out an invasion and no one would look up from their screens. In writing The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells drew upon the sensibilities of a public before they had endured two world wars, who were yet to know their domestic sphere broken by an event so terrible that it was remembered with such fervour a century later. As we lurch towards 2020, it seems that if aliens do indeed invade, there are far worse things on the horizon that should be feared. That is, of course, if that horizon isn’t already underwater. As the devil says in Angel Heart, ‘the future is not what it used to be’. We have exchanged one possible future for another, and this time there is a strictly no-returns policy.
Written by Esther Bancroft
A recent graduate of Bristol university, Esther has returned to the pen to write a little bit about a little bit of everything. When not staring at a screen trying to be creative, she likes to buy books without reading them and paint pictures of the sea - which is her healthy obsession.