Sci-Fi Set in the 2020s and 2030s: 6 Futures That Are Now (Nearly) Here
The films, novels and series in our archive set in years that have arrived or soon will, in order of when they're set, with a check on how each date is holding up.
The best sci-fi set in the 2020s that we've reviewed is Children of Men, which takes place in 2027. Years and Years follows a Manchester family from 2019 to 2034, and Upload is set in 2033. All three dates are now close enough to check.
This guide covers works whose setting years are stated in our reviews or prediction ledgers. Plenty of near-future fiction never names a year, from Her to Moon to Black Mirror, so we've left those out rather than guess. The six below are listed in order of when they're set, not ranked by quality; each card shows our score and Nearness reading if you want to choose that way.
It's an odd moment to read them. A setting year is a promise, and most of these are coming due. Children of Men's 2027 is next year. The Ministry for the Future opens with a heatwave in 2025. Station Eleven's pandemic begins in 2020, which turned out to be a strange year to have chosen. The pattern in our ledgers is consistent: the headline catastrophes mostly didn't happen on schedule, and the smaller, duller things around them mostly did.
For every work in our archive plotted by date, see the near-future timeline. For films of any year, see the best near-future sci-fi movies.
Set 2019–2034. Russell T Davies follows the Lyons family across fifteen years, one jump per episode, with history reaching them as phone notifications and rows at birthday parties. Several events landed within a few years of the show's dates: a second Trump term, Ukrainian refugees arriving in Britain and an American bank collapse that rattled Britain. The outcomes differed. Kyiv didn't fall, and depositors were made whole. Its forecast that AI would take accountants' jobs by 2025 is unproven. Big-hearted, over-talkative and often brilliant, it predicted the feeling of the decade: everything happened, and nobody decided.
Set 2020 to about 2040. A flu reaches Chicago in 2020, and the show jumps twenty years to a troupe performing Shakespeare for the survivors. Its first weeks arrived almost scene for scene in 2020: grounded planes, sealed flats and passengers kept aboard in quarantine. Its premise didn't. The real pandemic killed roughly one person in five hundred, and by 2024 air traffic was above its 2019 level. Shot partly before COVID and released during it, it's warm, beautifully acted and the only end of the world on television you'd want to watch again.
Set 2025 to the middle of the century. The novel opens in northern India in 2025, in a heatwave that kills around 20 million people, then follows a Zurich agency that speaks for future generations over the decades that follow. India's 2024 heat season came nowhere near that toll, though our ledger treats such a disaster as near rather than far. Central banks did start to treat climate as their business, and some then left the cause. The cooperative politics that rescue the book are its least supported prediction. A dazzling brief, often a chore as a novel.
Set 2027. Cuarón's Britain has had no babies for eighteen years, and with its setting a year away, the central premise has missed: children are still being born everywhere. Almost everything around it has moved closer. South Korea's president called his country's birth rate a national crisis. Britain passed a law to detain and remove people who arrive irregularly, tried to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda and housed them on a barge in Dorset. Assisted dying is spreading. It's the best film we've reviewed, and in 2027 the babies will still come.
Set 2033. A dying programmer's mind is uploaded to Lakeview, a luxury digital afterlife that charges for upgrades and grades its human support staff on star ratings. Uploading a mind is nowhere near its 2033 date; science has mapped a fruit fly's brain, not a person's. The business has arrived: star-rated service work, paid AI versions of the dead, and driverless cars that are spreading if not yet owned. It's a likeable, uneven comedy with one superb idea. Right about the business, wrong about the technology.
Set in the 2030s, by the author's account. The novel itself never fixes a year, and our ledger records it as the mid-21st century, but Gibson has said he imagined the 2030s. Its decade is close, and its world is partly here. A global network used daily by billions arrived in 2011, by our ledger. Neural interfaces, software copies of the dead and laws to police powerful AI are all arriving. What hasn't come is the form: nobody jacks into a neon grid, and we carry cyberspace in our pockets instead. The prose is still electric, and the plot is still hard to follow.
What sci-fi is set in 2027?
Children of Men is the famous one. Alfonso Cuarón set his collapsed, childless Britain in 2027, and the film opens with the death of the youngest person on Earth. Our review of Children of Men grades the film against the year it's about to reach.
Did Years and Years come true?
Partly, and uncomfortably. On our ledger, a second Trump term and Ukrainian refugees arriving in Britain have both happened, AI taking office jobs is still arriving, and the bank collapse that wipes out British savers diverged, because governments stepped in after Silicon Valley Bank failed in 2023. It scores 62% on the P(n) Board.
Is Upload's 2033 realistic?
For the technology, no. Our ledger puts uploading a human mind decades away, with a central estimate around 2080. For the business, mostly yes. Companies already sell interactive versions of the dead to the people who survive them, and service workers' jobs already depend on customers' star ratings.
Why isn't Her, Black Mirror or Minority Report on this list?
Our reviews and ledgers record Her as an unspecified near-future Los Angeles, and the Black Mirror episodes we've reviewed don't name a year either, so we've left them out rather than guess. Minority Report has a stated year, but it's 2054, well beyond this guide's range.