Fiction hoping for the future… fiction yearning for the past: Mr Selfridge vs Star Trek.

The de jour future novel right now is dystopia.   In started right back when with 1984, but it’s magnified in the Hunger Games, The Resistance, The Spin, and so on. Nearly every future imagined is something worse than we have now.  Not only that, it’s something we have done.  We had the civil wars; we ignored the needs of the new generation; we used the environmental resources.  And that seems to be the place fiction is taking us – which I get.  The world is scary.

Yet I contrast all these futures to Star Trek.  Yep, I’m a trekkie.  A died in the wool, Voyager is the best series (don’t worry, I’ve heard it all) but I still love TNG and DS9 trekkie.  (TOS I’m not really that into –but I know all the relevant plot points).  The thing about Star Trek is it saw our – humanities – future as better. That we can do better.  That we, as humanity, should do better.  It challenged stereotypes – interracial romance; female leadership.  And it said we should all band together, and we should all do better.

And today I watched Mr Selfridge.  I really enjoyed it.  But as I watched it, I felt it was in a way a love letter to that time.  To that Britain, to that world.  And it made a point of how Mr Selfridge employed the women (well, until they got married), and how it was a brave new world, music swelling.  And I wonder, as much as I enjoyed it, whether there is some inherent harm in glorifying the past like this.  Yes, the story is great (I lived as a 12 year old in the UK in 1994.  Trust me when I say I loved Selfridges.).  But – should we really be harking back to the past for what we romanticize? Why not romanticize the future?  Why not invest in making our future not the dystopia?  Let’s Star Trek the hell out of ourselves.