Prompt: The year is 2224. You live in a world that few citizens of 2024 would recognize. You have invented a new form of time travel that allows you to send not people, but messages, back through time. In 2000 words (hard limit), describe your world to the people living in 2024, and explain to them how their society can achieve or avoid this future. In order to communicate your unfamiliar world to these citizens, you will need to draw on examples taken from the popular culture of their day.
Rules:
You can write about a location of your choice. It has to be a specific, real place.
Your environmental future can be utopian or dystopian:
If it’s utopian, you have to convince your readers of what needs to change about their 2024 society in order to achieve this future.
If it’s dystopian, you have to convince your reader of what needs to change in 2024 in order to avoid this future.
Your 2224 can be technologically advanced or post-apocalyptic; based in “hard” extrapolations from current technology or in “soft” speculation regarding a possible twist the future might have in store for society (like a new kind of system of ecological values), but it should have some basis in current speculative fiction trends.
Your essay will need a focused topic, so you will draw inspiration from one of the topics discussed during our ASTU class. These include but are not limited to:
Eco-utopian futures
Eco-dystopian futures
Apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic futures
Decolonial futures
Spirit world futures
Eco-authoritarian futures
Futures of land use
Community futures
Just transition futures
Green New Deal futures
Futures of abundance
High or low-tech futures
Requirements:
This is an argumentative essay; it should include a focused claim or thesis regarding what the world of 2024 must do to achieve or avoid the future you inhabit.
Required Source: You MUST refer to at least 4 sources that you discover independently in some detail to describe 2224. Each source must be quoted directly at least twice. You may use scholarly sources, and/or draw on and refer to any speculative fiction that you are familiar with, including books, short stories, comics, films, television, and video games.
Your message to the past must follow all conventions of professional style as outlined in the current edition of the MLA handbook, the standard for communication in 2024.
Include a Works Cited page of properly formatted citations for your speculative texts, your secondary sources, and any other additional sources cited in the essay.
I have provided an attached file of potential sources which are movies but you can use any other as long as they are in conversation with another without the use of AI.
