It seems like, if you're trying to portray the future, there is this problem with the fact that the future is actually going to come to pass-probably somewhat differently than how you've shown it. In some cases, people just don't care. They take their fiction as fiction and don't mind the inconsistency. In other cases, people latch on to the historical inaccuracy and find it frustrating.
Here are some suggestions on how to overcome this problem.
1. Very Far Off Future
One of the easiest ways of writing the future is to jump so far ahead that we aren't likely to get to that future anytime soon. When you have galactic civilizations built on space travel, you have this sort of thing. Sure, we may have more common space travel in the not too far off future if SpaceX has any success, but we're nowhere near colonization.
This works because the setting is too different to compare our current society to. Knowledge of the world is entirely different by inventors and scientists of the far future than it is to us, and any number of events could have happened to bring things forward or back progress-wise.
Numenera, one of my favorite RPG settings is still set on "Earth", but it's a billion years in the future and there are leftovers from previous civilizations that are weird and not understood even by the inhabitants in that setting.
2. Divergent Timelines
In this method, the setting may have been our world at one point in time, but then *something happened* that was different. Some major event shook up the entire world and set it on a course differently than our own. The bigger the event, the easier any inconstancies between the setting and our own world become to write off.
In Heroism and Other Lies, this is a method that I employ. I haven't talked about it much in what I have written, but there was a major war that shook the foundations of the setting. Nations were overthrown, world powers shifted, new sciences arose while other studies were lost. This war took place probably around our present, and so the future of the series is altered, with some things being developed that we might have long before then, and some things being commonplace that we might be far behind in.
3. Same but Different, Another World
Fantasy settings are well known for doing this. They have unique place names and characters and government set ups, but many of them tend to look like a romanticized version of medieval/renaissance Europe.
This tactic can easily be applied to futuristic stories. It's easy to change place names and other details to make your setting look similar to our world and a possible future for it without actually binding it in with our reality. In this way, there's less concern about timeline discord.
I hope these ideas are helpful to you.
Do you know of any other ways of approaching the issue of differences between reality and fiction in the development of the future?
I appreciate the breakdown of different ways to overcome the issue. It makes me think! I've often been intrigued about ideas of writing a story taking place in the future, but I admit it's often frustrating to me when shows/movies don't do a good job of making a believable world. So that's always been a struggle for me to imagine getting over that. Thanks for sharing and getting my creative juices flowing!
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