A child of the 80s I grew up reading ‘the galaxy’s greatest comic’ – 2000AD, an ongoing science fiction publication, now in the curious position of being a decade out of date. I recall being only too aware of how close the year 2000AD actually was – impending pan-galactic space adventures seemed assured. Combined with the prophecies of 80s BBC science sorceress Maggie Philbin, for this child, colonisation of distant planets seemed inevitable. Imminent teleportation capabilities for sure! Flying cars? Why ever not. In fact as 1999AD turned into 2000AD I stood in Cardiff city centre watching the ‘Welsh Elvis’, Shakin’ Stevens, rattle out his back catalogue from those self-same 80s. The irony would have been crushing had I not been so magnificently drunk.

One decade in, the twenty-first century finds us not only living in the future, but also the sequel to the future. Post future then, The Future Part II. Stanley Kubrick’s masterful space opera, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ spawned the creaky sequel, ‘2010: The Year We Make Contact’. 2001, as I recollect, was a poor year for discovering monoliths on the moon, and 2010 holds little promise for contacting life on Jupiter’s moons. Now we officially live in the sequel to the future, many sci-fi visions are now, chronologically speaking, behind us. Terminators 1-3, Robocop, Mad Max, Strange Days and Star Wars (a long time ago) all passed by with nary a messianic metal policeman, nor a Millennium Falcon to show for it. Fans of a dreich, violent, neon dystopia should know Bladerunner isn’t that far away either, although Lothian Road on a Friday night makes for a spookily accurate replica(nt).

Ryan riffs on Tomorrows World, steampunk, Stephen ‘Steve’ Hawking and flying cars. Research, what research? ...

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The closest we have to a decent bit of space travel is, predictably, a Richard Branson (starship) enterprise – Virgin Galactic. Imagine the carnage the astro-botherer’s buckteeth could inflict spinning out of control in zero gravity! Han Solo he isn’t, although fellow space-pest Stephen Hawking would make a great R2D2 unit. Other dizzying futuristic aspects of day-to-day life in 2010 include the self-checkout at supermarkets. Robo-checkout! Awesome! No, not really, you just do it all yourself and when nothing works you call over three assistants to fix the machine which, of course, has a mind of it’s own.
The Internet is the stuff of sci-fi imaginings, but, not unlike our Earth, it has been corrupted by our usage. I’d place Facebook et al higher on the list of threats to mankind’s existence than Al-Qaeda and Darth Vader holed up in a giant cave filled with Death Stars. Rather than a Terminator-esque future where computers become conscious, the more likely scenario is that humans will become unconscious when placed in front of a computer. The Evolution of the Species diagram will soon have an extra illustration of a bloated figure, pasty and hunched, with square eyes, twitchy hands and no mates.

Genius space pundit Steve Hawking advocates spending trillions on space exploration because we’ve broken our planet and need to relocate to other worlds pronto, else the human race is doomed! Brilliant robo-irony, we are to be the alien race landing on someone else’s shiny planet, inevitably ballsing up that one too. I hope on some distant world, an eccentric dictator – sorry director – is making an epic movie about warmongering mankind invading their exotic planet, led by a man in a wheelchair with a big… huh, what’s that? Avatar you say?

Personally I think there should be a ‘one strike and you’re out’ rule for destroying planets. So one way or another, tomorrow’s world isn’t going to be anything like the dreamy magnificence conjured up in childhood comic books, or by eerie harbinger Maggie Philbin and her roster of bogus oracles. In the wake of the Hopelesshagen fiasco even childhood begins to look, well, hopeless. “We have sold off our children’s future” said the French, and for sure bromidic issues like global recession, climate change and exhausted fossil fuels do not bode well. So in honour of an impending backwards looking future, The Leither proudly presents our eminently collectible 2010 revisionist steampunk cover. Eerily apt, recording as it does a fictional future clash of Barbarella kitsch, Victoriana, the science fictions of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, and taxidermy on leashes. As new as tomorrow, as modern as yesterday, but sadly still no flying cars.