1. The first recorded story which was set at a specific date in the future was an English tale published anonymously in London in 1763 entitled The Reign of George VI 1900-25. This described how, in the early twentieth century, a ‘Patriot King of England’ restored the fallen fortunes of his country and defeated an alliance of foreign powers, culminating in victory over a huge Russian army outside Vienna in 1918, making Britain the master of Europe. Although some of the story’s coincidences are uncanny, such as its prediction of a great European war ending in 1918, the world it projected into the future looked remarkably like that of the time when the story was written: so that twentieth century wars were supposedly still being fought in eighteenth-century style, with cannons, muskets and cavalry charges.

2. This argument echoes that of the speech made by the Grand Inquisitor to Christ in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. When Christ returns to earth he is imprisoned by the Spanish Catholic Church because his teaching must be regarded as subversive of the totalitarian social order sanctioned by the Church in the name of Christianity.

3. We saw this pattern reflected in the conclusion of Judgement Day, the sequel to The Terminator. These films are also shaped by the theme of an individual rebelling in the name of human values against a world-dominating totalitarian system. Other ‘science fiction’ stories based on this theme include The Space Merchants (1953) by Kornbluth and Pohl, in which the world-system is dominated by huge corporations which act to enslave everyone in the world to consumerism through a relentless bombardment of advertising slogans. The hero, a senior copywriter working for one of the two big advertising agencies, joins an underground network of ‘conservationists’ who are trying to save the world from destruction by over-exploitation of its material resources. He ends by escaping with his wife to Venus to start a new civilisation based on conservation. Another film based on this plot was Francois Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966), showing a totalitarian society in which all books are banned as subversive. The hero is a fireman whose job is to seek out any books and burn them (451 degrees Fahrenheit being the burning point of paper). His disillusionment then draws him into joining an underground network of dissidents who aim to overthrow the system.