Saturday, May 26, 2012

The '90s in Sci-Fi: Hell on Earth

Sometimes we look back at the '90s with a bit of rose-colored nostalgia. Roaring economy, dial-up, post-Cold War global sigh of relief, Hamster Dance.

But have we forgotten all the majorly bad things that happened? The '90s were one humanity-threatening calamity after another. A few of the momentous-disastrous events that shaped the '90s:

1991: Ape slaves rise up against their human masters, setting in motion a chain of events that will culminate in Charlton Heston kissing a freaking ape.
1996: The bloody Eugenics Wars finally end and one of the most notorious genetically-engineered warlords, Khan Noonien Singh, flees the planet on the Botany Bay to wreak havoc another day.
July 1996: Devastating alien invasion is repelled with the help of a former fighter pilot Lone Star of a President, a MIT-trained cable repair man, and a wisecracking Fresh Prince of the Air (Force); the world is saved, at the cost of nearly every major population center.
December 1996: Extremely deadly virus is released at various points around the globe by a bio-terrorist (not the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, as history would erroneously record), driving the remnants of humanity underground.
August 29, 1997: SkyNet, the artificial intelligence network given autonomy over nuclear launch decisions, becomes self-aware and resists frantic human attempts to disconnect it; 3 billion lives end on "Judgment Day."
1998: "Armageddon" asteroid is destroyed in space but leading fragments cause major damage to prominent American cities; "Deep Impact" comet does hit the Earth, devastating every coast touching the Atlantic.
1999: Revelation that the '90s is actually a mind-prison--a simulation designed by life-sucking machines--and the real year is closer to 2199; subsequent events reveal this to be a vast underestimate.
1999: Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace is released. What a piece of shit.

Rough decade for humanity but we made it through (actually, I think we're all dead like nine times over). Then came the Bush years.

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