Imagine you write a powerful, visionary science-fiction book called 2157 - Attack of the Andromedans! It's all about how in 150 years the Earth will be fighting a desperate intergalactic war with spaceships and aliens and light-speed weapons and all that.
But as the year 2157 approaches, it becomes clearer and clearer that none of this stuff is actually going to happen on time -- by the time that year is past, your book will look like nothing more than cheesy pulp sci-fi trash that was loaded with empty hype.
However, a variable title - registered with your publisher and copyright office, will enable the year in your title to change every year to always be 150 years in the future -- so your book never goes out of date!
If you feel that Earth is in fact getting closer to reaching the events described in your story, you can apply for a change of title to redefine the variable as "current year + 50" or something.-- phundug, Sep 28 2007 X Minus 1 http://www.archive.org/details/XMinus1_ASCi-Fi radio plays from the 40s and 50s in MP3 format. Some it's pretty funny, but some of it's really good. My fave so far is "Hallucination Orbit". [lostdog, Sep 28 2007] 2041: A Space Odyssey.-- k_sra, Sep 28 2007 I dunno... I find anachronistic titles like that quite charming. Lately I've been listening to a lot of old sci-fi radio plays on MP3 from the 40s and 50s (I'll post a link - they're out of copyright so totally legal to download): there's something charmingly odd about hearing "The future: it's the year 1985..." It puts the plays very much in their own time, and it's really interesting to see the hopes and fears of those days projected into a future which is now our past.-- lostdog, Sep 28 2007 There was a film that did this a few years back. It was released as Dracula 2000 in most places, but due to delays became Dracula 2001 in the UK, Finland, Spain, Columbia and France, and was Dracula 2002 in Belgium. In the spirit of global equality it managed to be rubbish everywhere.-- hidden truths, Sep 28 2007 George Orwell's 1984--too late...-- xandram, Sep 30 2007 Songs too - Let's party like it's 2019-- hippo, Sep 30 2007 -1-- nomadic_wonderer, Sep 30 2007 random, halfbakery