Far future in fiction


The far future, here defined as the time beyond the 10th millennium, has been used as a setting in many works of fiction or popular scientific speculation.

''Doctor Who''

The British science fiction series Doctor Who has featured many events beyond the 10th millennium AD due to time travel being a key aspect of its format:
's Dune series spans thousands of years of distant future history in a galactic, and eventually multigalactic, setting, describing an interstellar feudal system enabled by a prescience-imbuing drug known as the spice.
In Poul Anderson's novella Flight to Forever, physicist Martin Saunders test drives a time machine to a short time in the future, then discovers that he is unable to return. He continues to go forward in time in hope of finding technology that can help them travel back in time. After visiting 2073, 2500 and 3000 AD, he then reaches:
's Foundation series, comprising the union of his Robot novels, Galactic Empire novels and Foundation novels, describes a future history of humanity from 1996 to tens of thousands of years from now. The 11th millennium occurs after the end of the Robot stories.
The Future is Wild was a speculative documentary hypothetising how life could evolve over the course of millions of years:
's novels Last and First Men and Star Maker are speculations on the evolution of intelligence in the universe. Last and First Men explores the future evolution of intelligence on Earth, while Star Maker explores the technological and social changes undergone by various alien species.

''Last and First Men''

's short story "The Last Question" charts the future evolution of Man as subsequent generations ask ever-more complex computers the same question: "Can entropy be reversed?" The story begins in 2061, when the supercomputer Multivac is asked the question and responds: "INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER". The story then jumps forward to an unspecified time at least a thousand years later, in which a spaceship-borne computer is asked the same question, and gives the same answer.
The Futurama episode "The Late Philip J. Fry" concerns a journey into the far future:
The science fiction franchise Star Trek has made several allusions to far future events:
's novel The Time Machine concerns an anonymous Time Traveller who embarks on a journey to Earth's far future:
The Games Workshop-created wargaming franchise Warhammer is, as its title suggests, set around the 40th millennium of its fictional universe.
's Xeelee Sequence, a collection of novels and short stories describing Mankind's war with a superintelligent race called the Xeelee, spans a time period from the Big Bang to billions of years in the future.

Literature