The future has already happened
By Joe Cannon
On April Fool’s this year, four astronauts left for the Moon. They were the first to make the journey since 1972, though the machines we launched in those years are still travelling, long past the end of their missions. The crew flew on a mission named for Apollo’s twin sister – Artemis. What they did was what Apollo 8 had done in 1968, though they went further and flew for longer. But it is essentially a mission that our grandparents watched, keen eyes fixed on blurry screens because it seemed then that the future was happening. Hollywood has a word for this: the legacy sequel.
Science fiction stories should have been the last place this happened. You could build anything in the expanse of the future. Yet William Gibson, who coined cyberspace in the 1980s and set the template for a generation of science fiction, spent the 2000s writing novels set in the present day because the present had grown too strange to extrapolate from. When he returned to the future in the past decade, he found an ending on the way there: a slow cascade of crises that kills off most of humanity by the end of this century. Even his survivors live on the far side of a collapse.
This phenomenon is called hauntology, coined by Jacques Derrida and refined by Mark Fisher. Hauntology describes the foreclosure of the future. It is the notion that we are haunted by the spectres of things that did not happen. It is not nostalgia: nostalgia is a fondness for the past, while hauntology is grief for a future that was promised and then withdrawn, leaving only its outline behind. Marx, who gave Derrida his spectre, described the tradition of all the dead generations weighing on the brain of the living like a nightmare. Hauntology is what happens when the legacy of the past becomes a debt. The danger is not that reruns are bad: it is that a future nobody can picture is a future nobody thinks to ask for. We have inherited so much that there is nowhere left to put the future. I am twenty and I have not been shown a future I might want to live in.
[Hauntology] is the notion that we are haunted by the spectres of things that did not happen
The dominant product in modern science fiction is now the legacy sequel: a new instalment of a decades-old original. Blade Runner 2049 sends Ryan Gosling searching through the wreckage of the first film for an aged Harrison Ford. Cyberpunk 2077 was built on a tabletop game from 1988 that satirised Reagan’s America, and stripped and sanitised all of that critique into a simple visual language of rain and neon and a generic narrative of corporate overreach. Even our modern gripes with artificial intelligence arrive pre-narrated by HAL 9000, Skynet and replicants. We are arguing about the present in the terms of the past.
For All Mankind imagines a world where the Soviets reached the Moon first, where Apollo was never cancelled, and where the space race never stops. To imagine a different tomorrow, the showrunners turned to 1969 and changed the past. We can no longer picture a future running forward from here – only one branching off the moment we decided things went wrong. When the series expanded this May with the spinoff Star City, it turned backwards again: it returned to a similar narrative from the Soviet perspective.
The biggest science fiction story this year released in March – Project Hail Mary, adapted from an original novel unattached to a franchise and featuring a unique and loveable alien at its heart. The appetite for new things is plainly intact, but it is worth inspecting its parts. Dr Ryland Grace is sent across the cosmos to stop something killing the sun so that Earth can carry on exactly as it was. Dr Grace’s victory is the world staying the same. The story was new; the more optimistic future it wanted was not.
The story was new; the more optimistic future it wanted was not
There are new things out there: you just need to look for them in the margins. Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem began life serialised in a Chinese magazine. Jon Bois published 17776 on a sports blog in 2017, an American football story told in multimedia through scrolling text and satellite photographs, in a form that could not have existed before the web. Both are genuinely innovative stories. But 17776 is also about a humanity that has stopped. On 7 April 2026 – six days after the Artemis II crew left for the Moon – nobody in that story is born again, nobody dies, and nothing changes about humanity for 15,000 years. Its narrators are Pioneer 9 and Pioneer 10, the inheritance of the Apollo years, launched before our parents were born, still drifting. They are the abandoned hardware of the space age, and they are idly watching a species that ran out of future.
Image: NASA HQ via Wikimedia Commons
