Ever since discovering the Ray Bradbury short story Frost and Fire at age ten, I’ve been an avid reader of science fiction books, usually devouring a dozen or so a year. When I became a serious anime fan, it was no surprise that I was drawn to the various sci-fi anime series that promised to show a vision of mankind’s potential future in space. Let’s look at the Ultimate Futuristic Anime Timeline graphic in this post, showing the “future” in which all our favorite sci-fi anime series are set!
I’ve Always Been a Fan of Sci-fi Stories
Recently I came across a graphic titled “Futuristic Movie Timeline” (below) that showed the year many famous science fiction movies were set in and where we currently sit in the history of these films. Of course, it’s great fun to look at movies that were set in “future” years that are already in the past for us. We often wondered whether the creators actually thought their predictions might come true when they wrote them. Did anyone think we’d have off-world colonies by the year 2019?
Growing up, it was always a joy to discover new sci-fi stories and conjecture about what the future might hold for all of us. Sometimes the future we were shown had lots of cool stuff, like flying Deloreans or starships crossing the galaxy at warp speed. Just as often, we witnessed a dark future for mankind, like in the original Planet of the Apes films. Often the future was so far off we couldn’t even hazard an opinion about whether the world the creators had foreseen was reasonable, such as the Dune series or the outstanding Hyperion Cantos (which every thoughtful Haruhi fan should read).
Why I Love Futuristic Anime
The first sci-fi anime I encountered was the original Space Battleship Yamato. Like Star Wars, it wasn’t so much a proper SF genre work as a more elemental story that just happened to use space for the setting to heighten the drama. Soon came Macross, then Mobile Suit Gundam, then Akira. Before we knew it, futuristic anime was everywhere, providing commentary on mankind’s future and our present.
I love sci-fi anime because it can show us future technology that might exist someday. Real-life robots are hard to make, but in Guilty Crown, they show these cute robots with stubby legs called Fyu-Neru, which can roll on wheels, scramble up stairs or onto furniture, communicate emotions with their faces and serve as data storage and retrieval units. While fully humanoid robots might be impossible for the foreseeable future, a robot with a simpler design inspired by anime might be more realistic.
Sources for the Futuristic Anime Timeline Graphic
I made my version of the sci-fi anime timeline using the image I found online as a guide, googling details of each anime and sometimes making the best guesses I could. Often there is no canon year for a certain story. For the Gundam universe, 2159 is a year posited by many fans to be a potential target for U.C. 0079 based on some questionable information published by Sunrise many years ago. For Nausicaä, the only information offered is basically “two thousand years ago, an industrial civilization emerged on the Eurasian continent, and spread to all corners of the world over a few hundred years” and the Seven Days of Fire occurred one thousand years ago. So I took the date of our Industrial Revolution and added 2,000.
Thanks for reading this post exploring the timeline of sci-fi anime and where we sit on it. Got any feedback or thoughts on the graphic? Please post in the comments below, or chat with us on Twitter!
