Today is a momentous day in nostalgia-land because it’s Back to the Future Day!  October 21, 2015 is the date to which Marty McFly travelled from the 1980s in Back to the Future II. We’re here, guys. We’ve travelled to the future!

Granted, we may have taken the scenic route while Marty coasted along the time-vortex highway, but it’s rare that a work of science fiction takes place in such a near future for the work’s modern audience to directly experience it. Since Back to the Future II involves Marty saving his teenage son from the doomsday of getting arrested (oh, the naïveté of the 80s), his time-hopping is reserved to a mere 30 years in the future (though the film was released in 1989, the story itself takes place in 1985). Kids who saw the movie in the theater are adults now, and our collective culture is currently embroiled in 80s and 90s nostalgia (from movies such as Transformers and The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to the television revivals of The X-Files, Gilmore Girls, and even Full House). It’s the perfect time to get a little teary-eyed over the lessons and movies of yesteryear.

There are plenty of sites today talking about all the predictions the movie made, but I’d like to talk about how this movie succeeds in connecting with its future audience where so many others fail.

One of the beautiful things about storytelling, about crafting ideas into words and having them exist as books, plays, and movies, is the ability to not only regale your current audience with thought-provoking life lessons masquerading as entertainment (as the best stories do) but also to exist for future audiences to discover and enjoy. Long after the creator is gone, society can still have a conversation with him through experiencing his works.

This means that, when you (as the creator) are portraying a near-futuristic society, you can’t just focus on “new” and “different” just for the sake of it. You aren’t just trying to capture your current audience’s imagination—or shouldn’t be. Some thought should be given to how the movie will be perceived by future audiences, if you want it to have the longevity and cultural influence that we all strive for our works to have.

The recent spate of dystopian fiction (turned movies) are set far enough in the future—never actually given a time frame, actually—that their environments might as well be a parallel reality or on a near-Earth planet. The worlds of The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Giver, etc., are given mild explanations for how society got from here to there, but any kind of real societal progression is never explained. Because of this vagueness and distance from the audience’s present and foreseeable future, it’s easy to just accept the premise and move forward with the story. The characters and their situations remain the highlight, not the world in which they live.

Other works, however, prophesy events in a definitive time frame. 1984, published in 1949, is obviously set 35 years in the original audience’s future. Lost in Space, a television series from the 60s, opens in 1997. Demolition Man, a movie from 1996, largely takes place in 2032. Each of these works involved a future date that modern society has now passed (or will soon pass), with predictions that might as well be a parallel universe for all the accuracy they provide (can anyone really imagine our culture achieving the crime-free and squeaky-clean future of Demolition Man in the next 17 years? We’ve only devolved on that front in the past 29). Each of these examples made outlandish claims for how the future would change within the small time jumps their stories allowed. The messages are still important and relevant (especially in 1984), but the suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader is harder to come by when that future time has come and gone without getting remotely close to the predicted version.

The futuristic scenes in Back to the Future II, however, are more grounded in reality. Screenwriters Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis (who also directed) were concerned over any attempts to try and predict the future, so they made a world “where what’s wrong is due to who lives in the future as opposed to the technology” (quoted here). In doing this, they kept the focus on the characters and not on the world in which they inhabited, in contrast to most science fiction. Perhaps that’s why we can look upon this movie in 2015 and not feel like it’s from a parallel universe: the technological advances—even those that didn’t come to fruition—are a natural progression from what existed at the time.

Therefore, we can now see reflected in our own current technology the thumbprint scanners, video chat, and mobile devices present in the movie, and we can laugh at the things that didn’t pan out, such as Jaws 19 and ubiquitous fax machines. It’s fun to make the parallels, it’s interesting to see how close some things got, but I don’t think that this movie will have the same distancing problems in future showings as the above examples (though, perhaps that’s just my nostalgia-goggles talking).

The important difference is the story wasn’t about the technology or future culture. It was about Marty’s family, period. That’s why Gale and Zemeckis, in my opinion, had the freedom to not go overboard with their predictions and make this the zany, complicated world that we often see in science fiction. They created a few gadgets that showcased developments of current science and left it at that. The characters inhabited these advances as part of their everyday lives, but the gadgets were always meant to support the story, not for the story to merely serve as a prediction of future technologies.

For these reasons, I believe Back to the Future II will continue on as an example of science fiction done right. It’s an important lesson to remember in my own writing: the story must never be slave to the world. Gale and Zemeckis were brilliant to realize that the future is still inhabited by humans, and humans—ignoring their technological advancements and fashion choices—have largely remained the same throughout history. Future human struggles are our present struggles, and it’s human interaction (with each other and with technology) that defines a culture, not the technology itself.

On a lighter note, as the granddaughter of a die-hard Cubs fan and the wife of a die-hard Mets fan, the most important prediction of the movie is that the Cubs will win the World Series this year. The Cubs and the Mets are currently playing against each other in the National League Championship Series, with the Mets up 3-0. This single prediction will either live on or die in tonight’s game at Wrigley Field, a fitting situation for the Cubs on Back to the Future Day. If nothing else, the fact that they’re even in this position, one level down from the World Series, in this particular year is pretty outstanding!