Futures past
Your Flying Car Awaits: Robot Butlers, Lunar Vacations, and Other Dead-Wrong Predictions of the Twentieth Century
I’ve always been a bit of a science fiction nut. Gadgets fascinate me. I drive a car filled with buttons and screens. GPS, climate control, sound system, cruise control, iphone, bluetooth, remote controls…
“We’re living in a science fiction age,” I tell my passengers, as I change to a new tune on the sixstacker.
And we are. My car may not fly or drive itself, but it’s sleek and silver and a world in spacetime away from the car my father drove – which had fins, may I add.
I have a supercomputer in my pocket with instant global communications. I can chat in realtime video to someone in the Faeroes. It’s just mindblowing, when I think about how newspaper stories of my childhood came via cable from London and were days behind. And don’t even think of ringing overseas unless you want to spend a fortune on a short conversation with somebody you could barely hear.
My younghood was full of visions of the future. The Jetsons, HG Wells, Popular Mechanics, Stanley Kubrick…
Somehow it didn’t quite work out that way. Modern London may have a few shiney towers, but much of it would be familiar to Charles Dickens. Paris more so, given that it wasn’t half destroyed by aerial warfare in a nuclear war.
This book looks at what the future was going to be like. 1984 never had human clones or rocket holidays to Martian resorts, dirigible cruiseliners with dinner in pill form served by robot waiters, but it’s fun to read about all the things we were going to have, backed up by quotes from leading thinkers on how all this stuff was just round the corner.
Or the things that blindsided us. Who saw the internet coming? Blogs and tweeting and viral videos. Revolutions run by cellphone. Capitalist China.
Paul Milo has had far too much fun with this book. One can almost hear him chortling with glee each time he pulls out some ancient government report advising investment in zeppelin stations for popular locomotion, skimming through for the choicest quotes on bionic eyes and lunar highrise.
I guess my favorite invention that never happened is the atomic car. Prototypes were actually built showing how the reactor would sit in the rear end, a safe metre or so away from the kids in the back seat. You’d never need to refuel, you could power your house from it, you could probably go supersonic if you needed to overtake.
And yet the concept makes the children of this modern age laugh until they cry at the folly of the notion.
My only criticism of this book is that it would have been enhanced by some photographs. The city of airships and towering saucer pods. The robot butler. The happy family off for a weekend on Saturn, Dad smoking his pipe as he soars past the moon.
Nevertheless, a good read, something to make you think next time you hear a politician talk about our bold new future.