Imagining 2065: A Journey Beyond the Portals of Futuria
In a bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina, I stumbled upon a coffee table book that pulled me deep into the kind of world I often find myself chasing in movies and art—Futuria: Art of the Sci-fi Age. It’s a curated collection of illustrated universes imagined by digital artists using tools like Photoshop, Procreate, and Blender. The book is structured around three “portals,” or visual genres: the neon-drenched chaos of Cyberpunk, the weathered desolation of the Post-apocalyptic, and a more clinical, Artificial future. For me, the first two hit hardest.
I’m drawn to sci-fi because it pulls me out of reality. It’s not just entertainment—it’s a full escape, a space where my imagination can drift far from deadlines, distractions, and the grind of everyday life. These stories and visuals let me recharge, giving me a strange kind of hope, even when the worlds depicted are falling apart. They’re not always optimistic, but they’re expansive. They remind me how big the universe could be.
The Future Was Yesterday
What fascinated me most as I flipped through Futuria was the way it made me think of my favorite Sci-Fi films—Blade Runner, Alita: Battle Angel, The Fifth Element, Oblivion, The Book of Eli, Mad Max. All these stories imagined versions of our future that feel bizarre, yet eerily close. Take Blade Runner (1982), for instance. Its future was set in 2019, a date we’ve now passed. And while we don’t live in towering smog-choked megacities policed by synthetic humans, the film’s mood still hits—its themes of surveillance, overpopulation, environmental collapse, and identity confusion feel more relevant than ever.
That’s the trick of great sci-fi. Even when the details are off, the emotional truth, the vibe, can be dead-on. It reflects our anxieties, projects our fears, and dares us to wonder: What if?
Through the Portals: Cyberpunk & Collapse
In Futuria, the Cyberpunk portal feels the most electric. These illustrations are alive with towering neon signs, foggy alleyways, and citizens half-merged with machines. Cities stretch into the sky, packed with tech but hollow in spirit. It instantly made me think of Blade Runner’s off-world colonies and The Fifth Element’s layered cityscapes.
If we try to imagine 2065 through this lens, we might see a world where virtual and physical life have fused. A person’s digital footprint could carry more weight than their real-world identity. We’d pay for ‘upgrades’ just to keep up—better vision, smoother speech, faster reflexes. AI personalities would be companions, therapists, and maybe even politicians. The world wouldn’t be broken in the traditional sense—it would just be overwhelming, always on, too fast to hold onto anything real. The poor might live under the cities, the rich above. Privacy? Extinct. Human connection? Monetized. It's thrilling—and terrifying.
Then there’s the Post-apocalyptic portal, where imagination takes a different turn. These pieces are sun-bleached, sand-covered, and full of silence. You can almost hear the wind sweeping across abandoned highways. It reminded me of the quietness in The Book of Eli, Oblivion’s loneliness after catastrophe, and the haunting, overgrown decay seen in The Last of Us (TV Show). In this world, 2065 might not be about tech at all—it could be about what’s left after tech fails.
Maybe an AI war knocked out the grid. An overuse of ChatGPT caused the internet to fry. Maybe global warming dried up the oceans. Maybe we just ran out of resources. Now, scattered human tribes wander landscapes repurposing old machines for survival, like in Alita: Battel Angel. Hope exists, but only in small doses—in a garden growing through asphalt, in the stories people pass around a fire. It's a humbler vision of the future, but one that feels almost soothing in its simplicity: survive, connect, rebuild.
Above: Images from Futuria — Art of the Sci-Fi Age
Why We Dream of Dystopias
Some people might ask why anyone would want to imagine these dark futures. But to me, books like Futuria and films like Blade Runner aren’t about despair. They’re about warning, curiosity, and strangely, even comfort. They push our minds outside the boundaries of the present.
They ask us: If we keep going the way we’re going, what does the world look like? But they also leave space for reinvention. Sci-fi reminds us that reality is malleable, and that what we do now matters. It’s not a crystal ball—it’s a sketchbook for the future.
And in that sketchbook, Futuria gives us the tools to imagine boldly. Not because we know exactly where we’re heading—but because we dare to ask the question.
So, what will Earth look like in 2065? No one knows. But one thing is certain: artists and storytellers will continue drawing the map, portal by portal, world by world—reminding us of what’s possible, and what we still have time to shape.
