Best Futures of 2007

The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon
This alternate history novel isn't exactly about the future: it explores what our present-day lives would be like if an obscure 1940s Congressional bill to turn Alaska into a Jewish state had been passed into law. The book takes place in a world where Israel as we know it doesn't exist, and Jewish Alaska is about to be re-absorbed into the United States, sort of Hong Kong-into-China style. Chabon's given us a terrific thought experiment, beautifully realized. The Yiddish Policemen's Union uses fantasy to invite you to reexamine your assumptions about everything, which is what the very best science fiction always does.

The European Union's Emissions Reduction Plan
At the recent U.N. Climate Change Conference in Bali, the E.U. once again reiterated its plan to reduce toxic emissions throughout Europe 25 to 40 percent by 2020 and 50 percent or more by 2050.

Angel: After the Fall comic book created by Joss Whedon
This comic book from IGN, in the tradition of the much-loved comic Buffy Season Eight, takes off just where the Buffy TV spinoff Angel ended when it went off air. People who watched the show will recall that it ended with the world ending. Demons from everywhere invade Los Angeles, the sky goes dark, etc. Sure it sounds dark and craptastic, but we can't help but want to go to future Los Angeles as ruled by demon gangs and unknown crawlies — especially with Angel still fighting Big Bads, Wesley back as a ghost slave, and Gunner doing the vigilante thing even though he's become a vampire too. This is a damn fine apocalypse tale.

"The Singularity," an essay by Catherine Valente
Author of the Orphan trilogy, Catherine Valente's smart critique of dumb stories about the singularity is probably one of the best pieces of writing about science fiction that we saw all year.

The Execution Channel, by Ken MacLeod
Scottish scifi author and political junkie Ken MacLeod delivers yet another brainy tale about futuristic political factions warring for justice. Set in the very near future — unlike most of his work, which is generally several singularities removed from us — The Execution Channel depicts a dark future ripped apart by government authorities drunk on their "war on terror." What makes this future good is that MacLeod delivers a realistic picture of what genuine and hopeful political resistance would look like, even in the darkest dystopia. His heroes fight the system, and they do it realistically, with politics and persuasion rather than guns and ammo. Well, OK, they use guns and ammo too.

A Gay Pill for Fruitflies
Scientists now have a drug that makes fruitflies exhibit homosexual behavior within mere hours after taking it. Not only does this fuel our fantasies, but it forces us to imagine a future where sexual orientation could be switched around so easily that it became a matter of fashion rather than politics. Also, we like the idea that the pill makes you gay, rather than straight. If this drug worked in humans, it would become the gay man's rufie at frat parties. Just slip it in your pal's drink, and three hours later you've got a hookup!

Chicago's "Bike 2015" Plan
It may never come to fruition, but Chicago's book-length plan (published online) to convert the windy city into a "bike friendly" region by 2015 is one of the only documents that could inspire me to write the words "fascinating city planning." There are hundreds of examples of easy ways the city can reduce its reliance on cars, and the plan is rich with examples from other cities that have done the same. This is futurism at its finest, because it not only predicts a different world but offers pragmatic steps for achieving it.
Battlestar Galactica: Razor
Nobody wants to live in a universe where the Cylon have destroyed most of the humans, but everybody wants to be on a space ship with all the heroic, intriguing characters Battlestar Galactica regularly delivers. What made the TV movie Razor particularly great is that it delved more deeply into the backgrounds of some of the most intriguing members of the Pegasus crew, including the lesbotic and psychotic Admiral Cain. Plus we got to meet the tough-as-nails Kendra Shaw, who made even the Cylon-punching Starbuck look kind of wussy.

Audacia Ray
Author of Naked on the Internet, and editor of $pread, the only indie magazine I know that's by and for sex workers, Audacia Ray is a top-notch sexual futurist. She's using the Web to change the way people think about sex work (no, it's not all bad) and may help to create the kind of world we see in Firefly, where prostitutes are revered as royalty rather than thrown in jail.

Proof that Homo Sapiens is Still Rapidly Evolving
A new study came out late in the year that proved homo sapiens is not only still evolving, but at a rather rapid clip. In other words, there's still a chance we can evolve into greenhouse-gas-breathing creatures before it's too late. Or, more realistically, it means humans have to face the fact that we're still changing and trying to stop it goes against nature.

These films join 475 others in the National Registry, although only 13 others are science fiction, including everything from Alien to The Nutty Professor. Even Groundhog Day is in there, trapping Bill Murray for all eternity in a regressive time loop. The Library itself chooses a few of the films, and the public nominates the others, which means you've got films like Fast Times At Ridgemont High sitting alongside Citizen Kane, so we're not clear on how auspicious an honor this is. But at least future generations will have access to topless Phoebe Cates.

Check out some of the cool features of the National Film Registry's Film Vault/Bunker:

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• It's built mostly underground, so a nuclear attack won't stop us from having fresh copies of Dances With Wolves at hand.
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• There are over 90 miles of shelves inside, which make browsing a real bitch.
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• A below-freezing vault keeps film masters, as well as Walt Disney's head, perfectly preserved.
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• They preserve digital film at the petabyte (one million gigabytes) level. Cell phones will catch up to that storage level around 2015.
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• It is fully equipped to playback antique film formats, even movies on Beta tapes.
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• It has high-quality fiber optic connections to Capitol Hill for when your congressman needs to run out and catch a few minutes of Do The Right Thing.
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Wuthering Heights Among 25 Top Films [Yahoo]

(Note: We're not judging these things on their own merits as entertainment, or science. We're looking at how much we hated their versions of the future.)

The Invasion. In this movie's future, we encounter extraterrestrial life forms, and they're like Prozac parasites. They make everybody ridiculously well-adjusted and devoid of affect. Many people complained about the new upbeat ending, but it would have been great if science had overcome the parasites in a clever, believable way. Instead, we got the magic tacked-on rescue, followed by the easy miracle cure. Blah.

Spider-Man 3. Yet another movie about an alien parasite that changes your behavior. This one causes extreme singing and dancing foolishness, plus bad emo hair. The struggle with the Venom parasite, so intense and disturbing in the comics, becomes campy and dumb. And not unlike Invasion, SM3 has a pat -feeling resolution to the parasite dilemma. Sure, it makes sense that our future holds struggles against behavior-modding creatures, but do they have to be so boring?

Bionic Woman. This TV show should be just our flavor of near-future dystopia. Normally, we love an evil brain-sucking corporation that implants its technology into a woman and then believes it owns her. Unfortunately, BW just isn't bleak or brutal enough to be a fun dystopia. Instead, it's just wishy-washy. The bionics actually make Jaime wimpier instead of stronger. And the evil corporate overlord starts baby-sitting Jaime's sister and washing her dishes. Why?

Chuck. Another NBC TV show about a human who absorbs spy technology, another boring bleak future. Chuck gets the whole CIA/NSA spy database in his brain, but the spymasters who want to use him are ruthless and scheme to murder him as soon as they can line up a replacement. Too bad Chuck is such an annoying squealer that we root for him to die so we can get Chuck 2.0 instead.

I Am Legend. This movie belongs on the "worst" list because of that horrible tacked-on ending, which made The Invasion look like Citizen Kane. First of all, the science-magic device of the mutant's blood containing the anti-plague serum isn't explained at all. And then the salvation of the human race turns out to be this crappy little whitebread New England town, walled in against the heathen plague vampires. Bring back the Partridge Family plague survivors from Omega Man!

Y: The Last Man. In previous years, this comic-book series would have been on our "best futures" list. But it gets on the "worst futures" list for 2007 because of that bogus explanation for how all the men died. Sure, every man on the planet dropping dead at once was never going to have a totally logical explanation. But the explanation we get is just nonsensical, mystical and weirdly anti-science. (There's an alternate explanation involving the Israeli military and a botched bio-weapon, but it's discounted.)

Facebook's Death Grip. We'll all have too many Facebook friends to cope with in the future, net-preneur Jason Calacanis told the Washington Post. Now that Calacanis has thousands of Facebook friends, he just can't deal with all the friend requests and other trivia. So he's outsourcing his friend-management to an intern. In a few years, we'll all be in the "death grip" of overwhelming friend management that will prevent us having a real social life and make us hate our friends. Sign us up!

Future Files: The Next 50 Years by Richard Watson. The reviews and interviews of this book alone make it sound hilarious. For starters, in the future we'll have "ethical bankruptcy" to let us launder our reputations, because all our mistakes will be exposed online. And we'll suffer from "time-famine" and "space-anxiety." D00d! Anti-globalism will crush the European Union. The items in your fridge will talk to each other and formulate a possible dinner menu. Freud, Einstein and Darwin may well be debunked. But global warming won't be much trouble. My favorite part: he doesn't actually know what Friendfinder is. He thinks it's a service that tells you where your friends are currently located. Right. And Alt.com is all about tracking alternate timelines.

The Dark Space by Marianne De Pierres. This space-opera novel takes place in a dark future where humans have colonized Orion. And it falls back on one of my pet peeves: the far-future society that somehow mimics our own past. The human settlers on the planet Araldis somehow live in a crappy copy of Renaissance Italy. Except that it's all cyber, so instead of saying "bambino," they just say "'bino." Which we kept thinking was short for "albino." Oh, and an outer-space God speaks in 1337-speak.

Heroes. And finally, another NBC TV show. (Poor suffering NBC.) We didn't hate everything about "volume two," but the visit to the evil plague future was boring. And the hero-visits-horrible-future trick already happened in season one. This time around, it felt really peremptory, like "here's your horrendous death-future, so suck it bitch." Plus it would be worth losing 98 percent of the world's population to get rid of that boring Irish woman.