Fresh FIction Box Not To Miss
Janet Elizabeth Henderson | RED ZONE
Author Guest / May 3, 2019

Do you remember the TV show Buck Rogers in the 25th Century? For a while, it was my favorite show as a kid. For those who don’t remember, the premise of the show was that a US astronaut got accidentally frozen on a deep space mission and then was defrosted five hundred years later, only to find that Earth was a completely different place to the one he remembered. Although the TV producer’s vision of the future looked a lot like the era it was made—Farrah hair, shiny neon cat-suits, and mini-skirts! The thing that really stuck with me though, *mumble-cough* years later, was that the hero was a man out of his time. All the cultural references he made were lost on the people around him. His jokes fell flat because they didn’t have the context for them. But we did. And the audience laughed along with Buck and commiserated that no one else got the joke. Although to be fair, I think sometimes we were laughing at Buck rather than with him. Go back and watch an episode, you’ll see what I mean! The thought of being transported to the future has always tickled my imagination. What would…