In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the 19th century saw a rate of technological progress unprecedented in human history. One of the side effects of this was the invention of science fiction, as the rate of change in the real world encouraged imaginative speculation about the unbelievable wonders, or nightmares, that lay ahead.

And it's at about this time, the late 19th century, that the year 2000 starts to take on a special significance in people's imaginations; not in a religious sense, but as a date symbolising the idea of the Future not just as a time not yet come, but as a radically different place from the past. Clearly, during the endless ages of, say, Egypt of the pharaohs, the idea of the future as radically different from the present wasn't going to happen; and for most of human history, whenever people have dreamed of a radically different future it was going to come about as a result of divine intervention from outside human history, rather than as a result of human development itself. But someone in 1890 will have been aware that they were living in a world that had been utterly transformed in the space of a human lifetime, and the magic date with all the zeros, the millennial date, draws the eye and people start to ask the question, "If technology carries on changing human society like this - what will life be like in the year 2000?"

Now clearly, over the past century there have been two answers given to that question - the optimistic answer, where technology brings about a utopia of peace, plenty, and usually human idleness; or the pessimistic answer, where technology either destroys humanity or enslaves it.

And we're going to take a look at some of those visions now.

Firstly, the optimistic view, which I think is best symbolised by 2001: a Space Odyssey - in particular the Blue Danube sequence with the space station and the trip to the moon.

When I was a child in the late 60s, this was the vision of the future we were brought up on - a future of technological optimism and freedom. When I saw 2001 again a couple of years ago, after not having seen it since the 70s, I was heartbroken - this was the future I was promised, my childhood dream - and it will never happen. I feel robbed, in a way.

By the 1980s it was obvious that the shiny space-age vision of the future wasn't going to happen, and the worsening of the Cold War brought about by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the election of Reagan, the deployment of cruise missiles etc, brought about a series of visions of the future as nuclear nightmare such as hadn't been seen since the 50s, all encouraged by the increasing apocalypticism of the religious right in America who almost seemed to enjoy what was going on. Let's take a look at the opening sequence of Terminator 2:

Note the irony of the date - those visions now look a little dated, since the end of the Cold War. We at Grace know that machines can't take over the world, because they can't even work the slide projector. My, they're going to have to evolve fast!

So where does this leave us now that we're almost at the year 2000? What's been creeping up on us in the years since the 60s, is that the Future isn't futuristic after all - it's pretty much like the past but with different gadgets.

Sometimes the future arrives, but more slowly than expected. I remember seeing designs for people-carriers in the 1960s, but it took the car industry 30 years to get around to it. And virtual reality - remember that? - very 1992 - looks like it's going to be another future that takes forever to arrive.

Human history as normal, in short, rather than a radical break from it. And although we're having a little burst of excitement now, once we get past the year 2000 there isn't another date to replace it, that can stand as a symbol of the future, for a very long time. 2100 doesn't have the same ring. And I'd suggest that the idea of the Future [capital F] as a place radically different from the past, as we have known it for the last hundred years or so, will fade away and we will be back in a situation similar to that of, say, the 18th century, where the future was just whatever happened next, without the capital F or the apocalyptic vision. A future in which the human race muddles on through wars and rumours of wars, in which the battle is never won, but never lost either, until the Lord returns. The tube will still be dirty and we will get stuck in the tunnel, but the voice of a female android [excuse the contradiction] will tell us what the next station will be, if we ever get to it. In short, Blade Runner. Let's take a look:

Now this, too, is probably too pessimistic [I hope]; but it is I think far closer to a real future than anything else we've seen. It's a non-futuristic future, in which clothes and buildings have retro styling. It's a future in which electronics, and genetics, are simply business. And it's an environmentally degraded future. Blade Runner is based on the book 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' by Philip K. Dick, and what isn't made explicit in the film, but is in the book, is that most animal life is extinct. It starts with owls - one day all the owls are dead, and no-one knows why. Then another sort of animal just dies, and another, until hardly any real ones are left - and artificial animals are manufactured to fill the human need for nature. Uncomfortably possible.

now with that vision of the future standing as a warning, we're going to move on to reflect more personally on where we ourselves, the Church, and the planet are heading.

[steve collins]