🖊Christian Kritikous, journalist

The television series “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” which aired in the 1990s, had predicted a dystopian view of the problem of homelessness in the United States—one that wasn’t all that far from reality.

Looking at fictional stories that depict a very distant future, whether they are dystopian or not, has always been tempting for us as predictions of future events. But many successful works of this kind still have an audience even after their predictions have turned out to be wrong.

For example, the endless war in George Orwell’s 1984, which never happened in that year, or the interplanetary travel that Stanley Kubrick depicted in the film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which still hasn’t taken place even though we’ve entered the new millennium.

However, the broader insight of these stories into themes that endure—from authoritarianism to the evolution of humankind—has meant that even decades after the events they predicted, they continue to have supporters.

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