robby's stuff: How to plan a new sequel to the Back to the Future trilogy in 2026

Sunday, 5 July 2026

How to plan a new sequel to the Back to the Future trilogy in 2026

This is probably the closest I’ve ever come to writing fan fiction, but here goes…

The film opens sort of like a documentary about the history of hover-cars. The inventor, it seems, was searching for a way to help his young brother who had been crippled in an accident. His search for a way to give him mobility was what led to hover technology, which was later applied to motor vehicles and skateboards.

The film shows the scene of the accident between a white Rolls-Royce and a black pick-up truck. Both are wrecked. An ambulance is parked nearby, with paramedics surrounding the young boy. Others are assisting the driver of the black pick-up, whom we see is none other than our Marty McFly, who had injured his hand, and is looking absolutely horrified at what has just happened.

Suddenly the action stops, and then speeds into reverse. The boy flies back into the car, the black pick-up up-rights itself and speeds backwards, while the white Rolls-Royce glides backwards into the side road. Finally, there’s Marty McFly at the wheel of his new car, and Needles, in the other car, challenging him to a road race. Back into normal forward motion, the action proceeds, but it instead it happens just as it did at the end of Back to the Future III, in which the accident didn't happen.

Therefore, the little boy didn’t get paralysed from the waist down.

Therefore, his older brother didn't invent hover-conversion.

Therefore, we don’t have flying cars today in 2026, and Back to the Future IV is free to follow its natural course.

A few problems still need to be solved, of course. How did Doc Brown get his hover conversion without causing a paradox in the time-space continuum?

Maybe he just kept going yet farther and farther into the future until he did come upon hover technology.

And why have there been no more sequels to the Jaws film? What about holographic animated billboards? Or jackets that automatically dry themselves and tell you when they’re dry?

Maybe the invention of flying cars in that timeline was what inspired the other technology. Perhaps so much effort was made in developing talking jackets and holographic animation that drew the energy away from developing the Internet, so that in that timeline they’re stuck using fax machines instead of sending emails.

Perhaps, with technology speeding fast-forward, sci-fi films became redundant, and people watched Jaws instead.

But I’ve solved the first problem anyway. Someone else can sort out the rest.

I’ve got my own time-travel universe to work with.

The Back to the Future films were a landmark in the progression of time travel stories, and have their place right up there with H.G. Wells’ Time Machine, and Dr. Who. They gave us a point of reference for discussing and developing time travel ideas. I thoroughly enjoyed them myself and have watched them countless times. However, it needs to be said that Emit Brown’s theories regarding the danger of a paradox in the space-time continuum, don’t have to be the rule. In my own series of stories in Orphans of Space-Time, it is possible to go back in time, cause your own grandfather’s death at a young age, and still survive. You just become a Time Orphan.