Back to the future

Science fiction promised us a tomorrowland of jetpacks, Smell-O-Vision and male mammary implants. So what happened?

By Simon Reynolds

Read more: Books, Technology & Business, Science Fiction, Future, Fantasy, Books Features

May 12, 2007 | Staring out of my window in Manhattan's East Village the other day, it struck me suddenly that the street scene below did not differ in any significant way from how it would have looked in 1967. Maybe even 1947. Oh, the design of automobiles has changed a bit, but combustion-engine-propelled ground-level vehicles are still how we get around, as opposed to flying cars or teleportation. Pedestrians trudge along sidewalks rather than swooshing along high-speed moving travelators. And even in hipster-friendly New York, most people's clothes and hair don't look especially outlandish. From the trusty traffic meters and sturdy blue mailboxes to the iconic yellow taxis and occasional cop on horseback, 21st century New York looks distressingly nonfuturistic. For a former science science fiction fanatic like me, this is brutally disappointing.

I'm not the only one who yearns for the future that never showed up. The frustration is widely felt and has been mounting for some time, gathering serious speed in the late '90s when the really-ought-to-be-momentous new millennium loomed. Dates like "1999," "2000" and "2001" set off special reverberations -- not just for the science fiction fans among us but for plenty of regular folk too. Even now, when we should have grown blasé about living in the 21st century, the dates still have a faint futuroid tang, a poignant trace of what should have been. The obvious landmarks of tomorrow's world never materialized: vacations to the moon, 900 miles per hour transatlantic trains hurtling through vacuum tunnels. But the absence is felt equally in the fabric of daily life, the way that the experience of cooking an egg or taking a shower hasn't changed in our lifetime.

Nostalgia for the future, neostalgia -- whatever you wanna call this peculiar unrequited feeling -- is widespread enough to constitute a market. Enter Daniel H. Wilson's "Where's My Jetpack? A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived." This paperback sometimes strikes a melancholy note: A passage on moon colonies, which the New York Times in 1969 predicted were a mere 20 years away, notes that "the centerpiece of Disney's Tomorrowland attraction was the luxurious Moonliner spaceship. But a future that included giant glass moon domes never appeared. Tomorrowland was torn down." Mostly, though, the book's tone is petulant and impatient. The title itself, "Where's My Jetpack?" makes you picture a science fiction nerd stamping his feet in a tantrum. Wilson strives to speak directly to your inner 12-year-old: hence the high-fructose corn-syrup-laced prose ("crazy-ass mad science" and, in a section on an underwater city, "sea-tastic"), the groan-inducing puns (in the chapter on lighter-than-air transport, "blimpin' ain't easy"), the puerile fantasy of using an invisibility suit to sneak into the women's changing room.

A glib and flippant tone dominates "Where's My Jetpack?" but I get the feeling a more serious book is struggling to extricate itself from Wilson's arch and camp approach (something compounded by Richard Horne's kitschy retrofuturist illustrations). The research is top-notch and fascinating. Some of the best material here entails a sort of archaeology of stillborn or prematurely abandoned futures. In the 1960s, for instance, concerted attempts were made to build living environments at the bottom of the ocean, in the form of the U.S. Navy's Sealab program. But instead of aquadome cities nestling on the ocean floor and a massive exodus of pioneers emigrating to settle the briny depths, all that remains today of the dream is a solitary subaquatic hotel, the Jules Undersea Lodge, located just off Key Largo, Fla. Other science fiction staples that made a tantalizingly brief appearance decades ago but never caught on, for reasons either practical or cultural, include the jetpack (the energy required for blast-off generates dangerous levels of heat) and Smell-O-Vision. The latter idea was mooted fictionally in Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel, "Brave New World," in which the "feelies" stimulated one's tactile and olfactory sense as well as sight and sound. The idea was actually attempted a couple of times in the early '60s, but both times tanked in the marketplace.

Another classic futuristic idea made real is "cultured meat," i.e., animal protein grown in the laboratory, where, Wilson reports, it is repeatedly stretched as a surrogate for physical exercise, in order to give it the texture of a living, active organism. This grotesque technology was memorably anticipated in Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth's 1952 novel "The Space Merchants," a corporate dystopia of the 21st century in which peon workers hack slices off a gigantic blob of animate but nonsentient poultry breast called Chicken Little. But in our nonfictional 21st century, the idea languishes in the laboratory thanks to consumer resistance. Our cultural biases reject cultured meat as gross, unnatural, an abomination. Indeed, popular taste is trending the opposite way, toward the organic, the uncaged, the nonprocessed.

In "Where's My Jetpack?" Wilson frequently adopts a reassuring tone when examining a particular promised breakthrough that failed to materialize. Everything from the robot butler to 3-D television to the dinner-in-a-pill is presented as reasonably imminent (albeit likely to be way out of most folks' price range). Coming down the pipeline real soon is the anti-sleeping pill: not a central nervous system stimulant like amphetamine, and therefore avoiding all the associated problems to do with abuse and paranoia, modafinil simply turns off the need for sleep (although you can bet that in itself this will generate side effects and mental disorders). Also on the horizon is the smart home, as imagined in another Pohl and Kornbluth novel, "Gladiator-at-Law" (1955). Disappointingly, though, rather than anticipating your moods with décor changes and keeping the fridge stocked with all your favorite delicacies, the intelligent domiciles of the near future will be extensions of the assisted-living facility: apartments kitted out with movement sensors that develop a feeling for their elderly inhabitants' routines and send out alarm signals when, say, that regular hourly visit to the toilet isn't made.

According to Wilson, NASA is working toward establishing a moon colony (though a rather minuscule one) within the next 13 years. Better still, the classic science fiction fantasy of the space elevator that carries us from the Earth's surface 300 miles up to the threshold of outer space is already perfectly feasible, just prohibitively expensive. I would imagine the billion-dollar price tag for the miraculously strong cable the elevator glides up and down would pay for itself rather quickly, given that journeying into space (and as result the commercial exploitation of nonterrestrial mineral resources) would become approximately 100 times cheaper than the existing alternative, the space shuttle.

Wilson's talk of space elevators and other grandiose inventions like solar mirrors or the fully enclosed city indicates how our expectations of the "futuristic" have undergone an insidious scaling down in recent decades. Mostly, "the future" seems to infiltrate our lives in a low-key, subtle fashion. In their own way, the miniaturization of communications technology (cellphones, BlackBerrys, etc.) and the compression of information (iPods, MP3s, YouTube, downloadable movies, etc.) are just as mind-blowing as the space stations and robots once pictured as the everyday scenery of 21st century life. Macro simply looks way more impressive than micro.

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