PARIS, Dec 19 (AFP) - We were supposed to vacation on Mars. Fly to school on jet scooters. Be cosseted by robot butlers, which we would summon on our wristwatch communicators. Our planet would be rid of war, disease and poverty. We would all live long and prosper.
Or we would live in a totalitarian nightmare. Our fate would be ordained by genetic selection. Or there would be a nuclear war, maybe a scientific experiment that went horribly wrong, leaving a handful of stunned survivors on a wrecked planet.
Throughout the century, sunny optimism and bleak despondency have been the hallmarks of science fiction writing as practitioners of the genre sought to pierce the haze surrounding the third millennium. But now that 2000 is finally here, how accurate have these seers been?
There have been some smart predictions, among them lasers ("heat rays"), satellites, the Internet, interactive TV, electronic money, pocket computers and miniaturized radiophones, as sketched by H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, TV's "Star Trek" and others.
We can only be a few years from the smart house, foreseen by Bradbury's, "The Martian Chronicles," in which gadgets communicate with each other, carrying out cooking and cleaning chores according to a computer program.
Another vision that seems close to fruition is "the feelies," the gadget described by Aldous Huxley in "Brave New World" in which thrill-seekers can experience the sensations of what they see on a screen.
On the other hand, we seem decades away from commercial space flight or manned interplanetary missions, as Clarke and Stanley Kubrick saw in "2001: A Space Odyssey."
Nor are there jet cars to whisk us into the skies, miniaturized nuclear-powered devices or robots, which were the fetishes of sci-fi writers of the Fifties. Instead, our cars are updated, earthbound versions of the inefficient 19th-century internal combustion engine. In the post-Chernobyl era, the atom has become suspect; our energy still mainly comes from grubby old oil and gas.
Robots are making progress, but they are still far from capable of doing anything but the humblest, most repetitive movements.
And the idea of an ordered planet, free of strife, want and disease seems absurd when we think of Chechnya, poverty in Africa and the ravages of AIDS.
Where did these glittering predictions go wrong?
Perhaps it's because any vision of the future can only pass through the prism of the present, colored by contemporary thinking, politics and social stresses. "1984," written in 1948, was tinted by George Orwell's horror of totalitarianism, and Huxley's "Brave New World" (1932) combined the contemporary themes of collectivism, eugenics and Henry Ford-style capitalism. But neither nightmarish vision has come true.
If contemporary science fiction - "Bladerunner," "Alien" and William Gibson's "Neuromancer" - is any guide, the future has once more turned bleak. Our descendants will partake unthinkingly of recreational drugs and casual sex, struggling on a sick planet ruined by global warming, their lives molded by anonymous mega-corporations.
Richard Hart, an American TV journalist, says the "future-as-apocalypse" scenario has become boringly ingrained in modern writing. "The media is always portraying the future as looking 'futuristic' - which to them means dark," he told a recent conference on futurology in Silicon Valley.
"In movies and TV ads about the future, it's as if there is a light-bulb shortage."
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