The Prophetic Power of Science Fiction

From the 1975 film Rollerball to Godzilla, it seems the futuristic genre has been eerily anticipating real events.

I didn’t see the Zdeno Chara hit on Max Pacioretty as it happened, so I watched the clip for the first time on one of those sports-highlight shows a day or so later. As soon as I saw for myself the hockey check that has generated so much discussion, a single thought popped into my mind: Rollerball is here.

Does anyone else remember Rollerball? Released in 1975, the film depicted a futuristic sport – a version of roller derby – in which maiming your opponent is as much a part of the game as winning. Sounds prophetic, eh?

If football is a metaphor for warfare, then rollerball is warfare itself, with the players clad like heavy-metal gladiators. During the course of one brutal match, a teammate of star James Caan is rendered brain-dead by the violence.

Considering Chara’s hit didn’t get him suspended but is accepted as part of the game, I’m having a hard time seeing much difference between the way NHL hockey is played and rollerball as it was depicted in Norman Jewison’s film.

But my point isn’t to tut-tut the violence. (As a libertarian, I support the NHL’s right to present its product any way the league chooses.) What I’m trying to point out is how science fiction anticipated real events, once again.

It doesn’t stop with just the depiction of a bloody sports league. I interviewed Jewison a number of years ago, and he told me he wanted to show how the world was becoming increasingly corporatized.

In Rollerball, it’s big companies, not nations, that have the power to control world events. Some might argue we’re already living in that future. Want more examples? Events currently unfolding in Japan also seem eerily familiar to science-fiction fans. In one online story I read, Japanese schoolchildren were reported as yelling “Godzilla!” when last week’s devastating earthquake struck.

Debuting on the big screen in 1954, the giant lizard has long been a symbol of the nation’s fear of nuclear destruction. If you want a precursor that echoes the circumstances even more closely, check out the 1979 thriller The China Syndrome, which depicts a near-meltdown at a California nuclear plant. It landed in theatres just two weeks before the Three Mile Island disaster.

As I watch the nuclear crisis unfold in Japan, I can’t help thinking of a 1981 storyline in The Incredible Hulk, the Marvel Comic of my boyhood. The green monster, himself the product of atomic testing, travels to a radiation-filled Russian wasteland known as The Forbidden Zone in issue No. 258. This was years before Chernobyl produced the exclusion zone, an actual patch of uninhabitable land around the failed reactor.

Does the same fate await the Japanese countryside?

This article was originally published in the London Free Press.