Society Marches On: Difference between revisions
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Looney Toons (talk | contribs) (→Film: Deleted "Shoes of the Fisherman" example, as it's based on a misunderstanding of the relevant church law. It is indeed possible for a non-Cardinal to be elected Pope; it's *voting* for Pope that's limited to Cardinals under 80.) |
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Many works set in the future presume that people in the future will have the same basic social mores and morals as they do in the present, with only a few exceptions to facilitate the plot or create [[Author Appeal]].
This is a natural thing to
Unfortunately, it's often a wrong assumption.
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The most disturbing instances from our future point of view are those that miss more important social changes. To continue the '50s example, there are plenty of examples that failed to expect the civil rights movement. The schools may be futuristic and electronic, but they're still segregated. The other two big changes that older works miss are greater gender equality (even on the space colonies, women [[Stay in the Kitchen]]) and [[The Great Politics Mess-Up|the end of the]] [[Cold War]] (still wrangling with the Commies in the 22nd Century).
This effect increases with the distance between when the work is written and the present day. The necessary distance to invoke this decreases as time passes, so far
This will no doubt apply to modern works set [[Twenty Minutes Into the Future]] as well. Unfortunately, we won't know how until the social changes have at least started.
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* The book Steampunk Prime has a number of late 19th and early 20th century science fiction stories that contain examples of this. "In the Deep of Time" involves a man who is chronically revived in an advanced future... where woman STILL are expected to be subordinated to men.
* In ''[[Piers Anthony|Omnivore]]'', most of the melodrama pivots on Aquilon being torn between her feelings for Cal and Veg, her colleagues on a far-future space mission. It's blatantly obvious that [[Polyamory]] would be an acceptable solution for all three of them, yet she's too afraid of looking like a slut to become sexually involved with either man, let alone both. Maybe that's how scifi readers felt about things in 1968, but now it just seems like prudish [[Wangst]].
* Arguably averted in ''[[Atlas Shrugged]].'' While the time frame the book takes place in is deliberately vague (it seems to [[The Fifties]] with some sci-fi inventions, like Rearden Metal), the main character is a powerful career woman who courts and has sex out of wedlock with three different
== [[Live Action TV]] ==
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** Probably the worst example was in "[[Star Trek/Recap/S3/E24 Turnabout Intruder|Turnabout Intruder]]", the last episode of the original series, which reveals that ''women aren't allowed to be captains in Starfleet,'' in the 23rd century. A female character who tries to get around this rule by using alien technology to switch bodies with Kirk is portrayed as being a horribly misguided fanatic.
*** The franchise, naturally, retconned this in ''[[Star Trek: Enterprise]]'', introducing Erika Hernandez, a no-nonsense woman who had previously served with Archer, as the captain of the second Warp 5 starship (''Columbia'' NX-02). Of course, in the 2000s, people were ready for that sort of thing.
** Notably, the original 1965 [[Pilot]] of the series included a ''female first officer'' (who even wore pants in lieu of a miniskirt). She capably commanded the Enterprise for most of the episode while the (male) captain was held captive by aliens. In fact, she was the one who dispassionately decided that letting the aliens breed humans for slavery would be unacceptable, when Captain Pike seemed willing to let it happen as part of a bargain to save the Enterprise. [[Number Two|Number One]] coldly threatened to blow everyone
*** To be fair, they ''were'' right about that. Female test audiences of the time disliked the character, describing her as "pushy". And even then, they had Captain Pike make a (rather sexist) comment about how weird it was having a woman on the bridge. And there was some irritation among the executive meddlers that the role went to an unknown actress named Majel Barrett, for no other reason than that she was the [[Dungeonmaster's Girlfriend]].
*** Note that at the time, miniskirts were often regarded as a mark of ''female empowerment'', as it flaunted a woman's right to dress sexy if she felt like it.
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