In 1989, Martin Amis published a novel, London Fields, set ten years in the future in a world on the brink of a nuclear war. But the Berlin Wall fell as the book appeared, lessening the terror of millennium Armageddon, while another aspect of Amis’s 1999 – the restriction of mobile phones to a small super-cadre – also suggested an anti-Cassandra. While all art gambles on being overtaken by time, science fiction is most likely to lose the bet. Yet there is a fascination in predictive stories that have become historical period pieces, such as the two futuristic movies, more than a century old, screening in the BFI Southbank’s “The Birth of British Sci-Fi” event this month: Pirates of 1920 by David Aylott and A E Coleby, released nine years before its title date, and Wallett Waller’s A Message from Mars (1913).
Although, in the term “science fiction”, the second word qualifies the first, it’s tempting to tot up the success rate of guesses and Pirates of 1920 scores well. The silent, black-and-white short
imagines “air pirates” who use balloon-driven vessels to bomb ships, with the lofty brigands then sliding down ropes to take hostages. Within three years of the release date, there would be a world war in which the Germans used airships against ships, although this prophecy was not entirely the film-makers’ – H G Wells, the begetter of so much in this genre, had published a novel, The War in the Air, in 1908, anticipating the elevation of the battlefield.
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