Office...of the FUTURE!

Oh, and a bit of neutrino astronomy with some microelectronics for good measure.

Gets a bit boring, all this futuristic efficiency. Ah, the innocent days of the early computer age before PowerPoint came along to fill all those lovely, lonely hours.

Home computers...of the FUTURE!

Not bad. Need to work on that interface, though.

Pens...of the FUTURE!

A solar-powered pen that sets your letters on fire as you write them and a dictaphone/scriptwriter that I'm not sure qualifies as a pen. Nice, but they still don't rise to the standards of the dreaded atomic pen.

Mabel & colour telly

Tomorrow's World in 1966 looks at Mabel, the wonder robot of 1976 and the latest advance in colour television–sort of.

Sarah Connor reported unconcerned about cut-rate Dalek

As We May Think

Dr Vannevar Bush's 1945 Life Magazine look at the future complete with forehead cameras.

Our heartless friends

The Age of the Robot circa 1963.

Rocket catcher

Rocket catcher. Okay. Right. You might want to go away and think this thing through a bit more before applying for those grants.

For sale

What is billed as "the world's oldest flying car" (though I suspect that depends on your definition) is up for sale.

Mind you, there's no indication that the thing has ever actually flown, nor that this 21-foot long, seven-foot wide conveyance would have made it past the first hedgerow, so both "flying" and "car" are more theoretical than actual.

ODEX-1

I remember this one from my days studying robotics at university. I always felt that what it really needed was one of these:

Today, it would even be able to spot door knobs, which is not as fun as blowing the door open, but can be used to heighten suspense.

ZR-1 Land

What did airship expeditions to the Arctic expect to find? Why, lost colonies of Vikings thriving in warm fertile volcanic caldera the size of Pennsylvania, of course.

A bit of a reach, but it could be worse. At least they were doing better than their colleagues in the Antarctic.

Ford Aurora

The 1964 attempt at Satnav. Unfortunately, it hadn't been invented yet.

2010: The Year We Make Contact

I was re-watching the 1984 film 2010: The Year We Make Contact last night. Might as well while the irony is fresh, I thought. It's a fairly pedestrian film, which wouldn't be a criticism of a summer blockbuster if it weren't a sequel to one of the greatest films of all time with a script written with the help of Sir Arthur C Clarke himself.

Picking up where 2001: a Space Odyssey left off, 2010 opens with Dr Heywood Floyd learning that the abandoned spaceship Discovery with all its data about its ill-fated expedition is in a decaying orbit and will crash into Jupiter before the next American expedition can reach it. However, a Soviet ship will get there a year earlier and so Floyd, the designer of Discovery, and the man who built the homicidal Hal 9000 hitch a ride on the Soviet Leonov.

Not surprisingly, 2010 doesn't hold a candle to its predecessor, though you can't fault the director, who undertook the herculean task of re-building all the sets and props that Kubrick insisted be destroyed back in 1968 to prevent them being reused in other sci-fi films. Unfortunately, attention to that sort of detail doesn't necessarily make for a good film–especially when all the other costumes, props, and models look like they came from a completely different universe. Imagine if the makers of Star Trek kept confusing it with Star Wars and you get the idea. It also doesn't help that without Stanley Kubrick's cynicism and vision, Sir Arthur fell back on his own admirable, but overly tidy imagination that resulted in the transcendent mysticism of the first film falling sequel by sequel in this film and the novels into more and more pedestrian (and manageable) explanations about what was behind all the mysteries.

What many people might find interesting in the real 2010 AD is how far off the mark the film version is. I don't believe for one minute that Sir Arthur seriously thought the Russians would be building spaceships the size of frigates by now, but I'm sure he hoped so. What he probably didn't believe was that the Americans would start a new manned spacecraft programme and then abandon it (both being right decisions made for disastrously wrong reasons), that said spacecraft would be merely an supersized Apollo capsule while all the other versions public and private around the world would be merely updated versions of the Soyuz. Nor that the world's only space station would be built merely as an exercise in building a space station. Mind you, I'm not sure what to make of Pan Am going out of business or the notion that the Hal 9000 uses a Kaypro keyboard or that modern monitors would be the size of 30-inch CRT televisions circa 1995.

Unlike most other sci-fi writers of the Golden Age, Sir Arthur's politics aren't very easy to deduce. Or rather, they aren't until you realise that he didn't actually have any politics as such. If Sir Arthur did have any, it was that politics of any stripe is merely a temporary state of affairs until Science got a proper grip on the world and all that petty squabble would just melt away. Despite having folded like wet cardboard in 1991, the Soviet Union in 2010 is still going strong and the Cold War hasn't shifted an inch since 1984. In fact, the USA and USSR are still happily playing brinksmanship over Central America and teetering on the edge of nuclear war, so the last 26 years must have been awful "samey". That doesn't matter to the Americans and Soviets aboard the Leonov, though. That's because they're all Scientists with a capital letter. In fact, everyone in the cast is a Scientist. I even suspect that Dr Floyd's five-year old son is a Scientist, but hasn't finished his thesis yet. True, there is tension in orbit around Jupiter, but only because the Earthmen are obliged to follow the orders of their unenlightened countrymen. Left to themselves, the Soviets and Americans get along fine because Science is ever and always the objective and selfless pursuit of the truth in which politics has no place. It isn't that our heroes disagree with their governments, they can't even see the point of posing the question.

There's something charming about Sir Arthur's attitude–or would be if it didn't require him to indulge in moral equivalence to work. Even back in the 1950s in novels such as Childhood's End and Earthlight he couldn't imagine an enemy who might actually be ruthless and totalitarian or that the Cold War might have something to do with the Communists being really, really nasty. In 2010 I can't help but think that the commissar at Baikanour has fallen down on the job and is slated for a one-ounce retirement package in the back of the head. Surely the crew of a major Soviet spacecraft would have been chosen first and foremost for political reliability (fanaticism) before technical competence.

More to the point, Sir Arthur always struck me as being a bit naive when it came to science being apolitical and altruistic. You would have thought that Lysenkoism and Eugenics would have put paid to that. These days, what with the radical environmentalism of Rachel Carson et al and the tens of millions of deaths they've caused exposed to the world, the sexually self-serving fraud of Margaret Mead, and the on-going scandal of Climategate it's obvious that scientists are just as vulnerable to the corrupting temptations of money, power, status, and ideology as any politician.

That was true in 1984. It was true in 2001. And it is true in 2010.

Another Kitchen... of the FUTURE!

The Electrolux "Heart of the Home" kitchen of the future.

So high tech; so obviously designed by someone who never cooked a meal in his life.

Robomilker

Automatically milks cows and mucks out after them.

Highly unlikely to find Sarah Connor.

Update: More here. I particularly like this bit (emphasis added):

Today, they manage their operation using both a traditional 40-unit rotary dairy, which is milking 239 cows twice a day on their home farm, while 171 cows are milked through their robotic dairy on the recently-purchased country.

A traditional rotary dairy? I'll have you know that back in 1939 the rotary dairy was known as the Rotolactor; and as for traditional, it was the centrepiece for Borden's Dairy World of Tomorrow at the New York World's Fair.

Have people no respect for the dreams of Future Past?

Television... of the FUTURE!

Presenting the Ur flat screen television of 1969–complete with rotary dial for changing channels. Ah, the uneven and unpredicatable pace of progress.

Note that the electronics box is five times the volume of the screen.

Kitchen...of the FUTURE!

Yet another concept piece showing the kitchen of 2015. Never mind the touch cooker and the inexplicable shelving arrangement, I want to know what the rationale for the drop-down oven is–aside from building suspense around when the next gravy shower will be.

Jet Jaguar

Britain dusts off the old JET-1 for another go.

It's being produced by a consortium led by Jaguar Land Rover, so the prospect of a jet-powered supercar is at least real enough to daydream about.

Project 2000

Apple's 1988 look at the computers of the year 2000.

Nice, but give me a keyboard over those *&$%ing voice command systems any day.

AirMule

Israel's AirMule completes hover testing.

What a difference a 43 years makes.

Your Flying Car Awaits

Yesterday was one of those frustrating sort of days where you wish a "skip" button was available. First off, I'd wrenched my back a couple of days before–not in one of those heroic episodes of trying to juggle boulders or practicing the hammer throw, but in one of those annoying ones that involve turning in just the wrong way while picking up a bag of groceries. With one innocent turn of the waist I have been left with a sacroiliac that is a concentrated zone of agony. That's if I just sit still, of course. If I stand up (or rather try to stand up), I'm trapped at a 45° angle while my left leg has all the structural integrity of overcooked rotini. It takes a lot of teeth-gritting and the sort of keep-your-mind-off-it attitude normally associated with holding one's hand over a lit candle while jabbing a taser in the thigh, but I can manage to get more or less upright. I can even walk and if I do it long enough both the limp and the pain more or less disappear. Unfortunately, if I stop walking or sit down, it hurts just as much as the reverse. And did I mention that the whole thing has a knock-on effect that makes it impossible to cough properly, aggravates my ulcer, and leaves me desperately in need of a cup of tea, yet in no condition to enjoy it? If not, I just did.

Of course, the other part of my day was that it rained in that way that it does only in Britain and the Pacific Northwest; that cold, endless downpour that is neither a shower nor a storm, but possesses that relentless quality that leaves the air itself damp, sucks up any source of warmth like a sponge, and after two hours convinces everyone that it has always rained like this and any memory to the contrary is merely a fever dream.

This also meant that it was far too wet for the roofers to work. Whether this was out of consideration for not turning our bedrooms into swimming pools or their understandable desire not to skid screaming off of a slick Cape Cod roof is a question for another time, but it did leave me with the worst of situations. It's bad enough to lose a day's work because I'm fleeing the hammers and scaffolding crowd, but it's even worse when said crowd doesn't show and a whole day of work opens up and I haven't any real plans to take advantage of it.

It does, however put me in the perfect mood for reviewing books.

The item in question, Your Flying Car Awaits: Robot Butlers, Lunar Vacations, and Other Dead-Wrong Predictions of the Twentieth Century by Paul Mil0 (HarperCollins 2009), at first seems right up my atomic-powered alley. It is, after all, about Future Past. However, a book doesn't inspire much confidence when it's contradicted by its own title, since Your Flying Car Awaits deals with predictions that weren't "dead wrong" as well as those that were.

Unlike most recent works on Future Past, this one avoids the usual assemblage of magazine covers and images in favour of solid prose. As the title suggests, Mr Milo deals with predictions about the 21st century, but his list is a very vague one (Prediction: Cloning. Answer: Did that in the 19th century. Next.) and the treatment is equally vague and haphazard with each topic given little more than a cursory treatment. Mr Milo covers a wide variety of topics from flying cars to mind control, but his treatment is very shallow and perfunctory to the point where he blithely mixes decades of entirely separate developments. For example, in dealing with the Picturephone, Mr Milo manages to leap fifty years from Metropolis to Dick Tracy to Space: 1999 in a single sentence with what can only be described as acrobatics. Worse, he consistently does so without citing any sort of sources. I don't mean neat scholarly footnotes filling up half the page. I mean Mr Milo doesn't bother with perfunctory references or even a bibliography, so it's impossible to follow up anything that might be of real interest and one is often left with no more citation of a fact than attributing it to "a French engineer". It's an approach that a web page can get away with, but the whole point of a book in the Internet age is to give the reader scope and sustained insight, not the experience of involuntary surfing.

This was intended as a popular work and Mr Milo tries for a light touch. However, the book is really too serious in its approach to be humourous and too humourous to be serious. In fact, much of the humour is heavy handed and a bit condescending. Mr Milo would have been better served by another rewrite and editing out the humour entirely in favour of dealing with his topics in more depth and greater rigour.

The most glaring problem with Your Flying Car Awaits is ironic. Mr Milo has a very poor grasp of history (he cites Howard Zinn as a reliable authority!) and technology, and even poorer empathy, which is vital in understanding a subject like Future Past. He often acts as though the present is a target and that those in the past should be judged on how close their "predictions" come to the mark, though even a second's reflection would reveal that this is an unfair and unrealistic criteria. It's downright absurd when applied to political predictions since, by their very nature such prognostications will have an accuracy of precisely nil. The irony is that while Mr Milo writes about a succession of men and women who were blinded by the prejudices of their time, he is blind to his own. He's very much a mainstream American liberal of the more unreflective variety who regards it as reasonable to always use the word "housewife" with scare quotes for no readily apparent reason and has such a complacent set of leftist beliefs that he regards the simplistic socialism of Edward Bellamy's 1888 satire Looking Backwards as a reasonable goal without a moment's thought that it is only reasonable if you buy into Mr Bellamy's utopia, but an utter nightmare if you don't. It also doesn't help when Mr Milo happily espouses the possibility of outlawing war (I'd have thought that sort of pacifism died at Munich) and a one-world government when the outcome of the previous exponents of those very ideas in Mr Milo's own book might suggest to him that he's merely drawing a target on his own back. And in case anyone thinks that it is Mr Milo's politics that forms my objection to his book, I would point out that the pacificism/one-world stuff comes toward the end of the work, by which time I was having trouble even paying attention.

All in all, a very frustrating and superficial work that is rather like seeing a vast array of glasses at a wine tasting and discovering that they all contain coloured water.

Wavebox

The final blow to the self-heating meal–at least, while a 12 volt source is available.

Rotating house

Been there. Done that. Lost the keys.

Project Cybersyn

Free As In Beer: Cybernetic Science Fictions from Greg Borenstein on Vimeo.

Salvador Allende, a Castroite Socialist who was briefly president of Chile was far luckier than other Marxist messiahs in that he had the good fortune to be overthrown before he could do much damage to his country or neighbours. Since his administration was therefore a largely theoretical one, he's become a favourite of leftists who sigh over Allende's bright dawn of hope before the dark night of Pinochet.

Still, Allende did leave us something to remember him by, like his plan to turn Chile into a Socialist technocracy run from the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. A pity all the super cool monitors are just back projection slide projectors and there was no way to actually control anything or even make a phone call from the "control room".

Swings and roundabouts, I suppose

Golf...of the FUTURE!

And still just as boring.

Tip o' the hat to Paleofuture.

Airliners... of the FUTURE!

Found while browsing

I was surfing the net when I came across this blog entry by Frederik Pohl that includes a link to Tales of Future Past.

Demonstrating my innate maturity, my first reaction was, "Cool. Fred Pohl reads my stuff."

Future school

Presenting the school of 1989 as seen from 1969 courtesy of Shōnen Sunday magazine.

I don't know which impresses me more; the robotic thumping rods or those horrible shorts out out Invasion of the Neptune Men.

The future isn't what it was

Remember when the future was where we could look forward to technological wonders that would be servants and helpers to ease the burden of mankind? Not anymore. Why help people when you can nag and scold them through technology? Behold the glorious future; where park benches will dump you on the ground, rubbish bins will spit bottles back at you, and cars will slam on the brakes whether you want them to or not.

Welcome to the Age of the Busybody.

The Death Ray

Tales of Future Past update

I'm pleased to announce a major update to Tales of Future Past, including two new sections: Project Moonbase & Jonny Quest. In addition to this, there are over 80 new pages added throughout the site including a doubling in size of the Thunderbirds section.

Enjoy.

Mr. Szondy is not at all well.

In other news, I've been laid low by the flu, so I'm taking things easy today.

Working

Working on new additions to Tales of Future Past. Major update announcement very soon.

Interview

I have an interview with Republibot 3.0 about Tales of Future Past.

Power Loader

Looks like someone has dusted off the old Hardiman plans.

Slot bell

Can I have one of these today? One that runs on £5 coins? And what the hell is this "If it's a friend, the coin is returned" rubbish?

I have no problem with the funding charities bit, since I'm a charity all by myself (rattles tip jar).

Gizmo!

A couple of readers spotted that this item on the Triphibian was included in documentary Gizmo (1977), so I thought it was a good excuse to post the whole thing again.

I've always had a soft spot for Gizmo. Aside from being a lot of fun to watch, it was also one of the inspirations for Tales of Future Past. It's one of those goodhearted documentaries where it's clear that the filmmaker loved his subject, or at least had tremendous empathy for it. Like The Atomic Cafe, released five years later, uses a collection of stock footage to make its point, However, unlike The Atomic Cafe, which derives its humour from sneering at its subject, Gizmo positively celebrates these incredible eccentrics of the past and finds its humour by not just looking at the silliness and shortcomings of the various inventors, showmen, exhibitionists, and stuntmen, but also their dreams and ambitions that turns what could have been a collection of mockery into tribute to human ambition. In many ways, these are people we have a better chance of identifying with than an Edison or Bell. I certainly expect that if I built an aeroplane it would look more like the ones in Gizmo than something that rolled out of the Wright brothers' shop–and fly just about as well.

Triphibian

The WASP

Ladies and gentlemen, the world's slowest and easiest to hit aerial combat target.

Taxi

Taxis... of the FUTURE!

Ford Glideair

Yet another flying car... of the FUTURE!

A meeting of Titans

James Lileks and I are mentioned in the same blog posting.

For some reason, the commenters seem a bit disteracted

Future Fashion

Men's fashions... of the FUTURE!

City of Domes

Now where have we seen this sort of thing before?

Future dining table

The table... of the FUTURE! Complete with mini-frdge, mini-drawers, mini coffee-maker, mini-microwave, mini-dishwasher, and mini-toaster for making mini meals. And, apparently, you can't remove the chairs because that would be too bourgeois.

But, for some bizarre reason, it connects to the Internet, so that's all right then.

The Astounding World of the Future

It doesn't look the same from the council estates, does it?

Skybike

They're at it again. Since the flying cars are slow in coming, let's go for flying motorcycles.

Telephones... of the FUTURE!

Courtesy of the ever-inventive lads down at the GPO.

Sleep Learning

The idea of listening to lessons in your sleep was already old when this article came out, but I still find it fascinating.

I thought the voices only spoke to me.

New Dimensions

From the 1939 New York World's Fair. The future doesn't belong to robots as long as there are self-assembling cars around.

Tells you how much things have changed. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what the thing playing the bagpipe music was until I realised that it was an inner tube for the spare tyre.

Jettison Cocoon!

One of the great disappointment of the Jihadist War is that Bin Laden didn't have one of these in an escape tunnel in Tora Bora.

Hummel

The personal helicopter... of the FUTURE!

This looks vaguely familiar.

High Road Aerocar

Leigh Aerosystems presents its entry in the flying car sweepstakes, now undergoing wind tunnel tests.

I sincerely hope that the wings are retractable, otherwise side roads, parallel parking, and passing cars could be a problem.

All American Space Fleet

Not just a space fleet, an All American space fleet.

Tip o' the hat to Retro Thing.

Space:1918

Seeing the universe at 120 mph.

Bring something to read.

Robophrenologist

Studies head bumps; thinks this will locate Sarah Connor.

Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab

The Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab from 1952. If this had still been available 15 years later, I'd have been the only kid in the sixth form with a hydrogen bomb.

Moon Zero Two Live

The new Tales of Future Past section, Moon Zero Two is now live.

Enjoy.

Terrafugia Transition

The Terrafugia Transition takes its first flight. It's still more of a roadable aircraft than a flying car, but it's further along than some of its ancestors.

Coming Attractions

A new section looking at the cult sci-fi film Moon Zero is in the works for Tales of Future Past.

Here's a preview.

Buck Rogers

A little background on the hero turned catchphrase; courtesy of Kelloggs.

Trading Cards... of the FUTURE

A fascinating collection of Space Age trading cards in full, glorious, lurid colour.

Tip o' the hat to Chris Bale

Future Bath

The ultrasonic bath has long been a feature of our Future House section and now we get to see it in action.

The sounsdtrack is in Japanese, so it's unclear whether they managed to attach shame to it.

Death Bombs

A ridiculous and clearly racist 1933 article claiming that Imperial Japanese military pilots would willingly fly a aircraft packed with explosives straight into targets and commit suicide for the glory of the Emperor. This sort of...

Hang on.

Progress

Trim hedges! *Beep* Obey! Trim hedges! *Beep* Obey! Trim hedges...

Bulletproof Relationship

This must have been a fairly interesting marriage

Buck Roger Revisited

Just because you can do CGI doesn't mean you should.

Diet Plan

So busy these days that you don't have time to eat? Then why not scarf the lot all at one go and be done with it?

Mind you, according to this 1932 Popular Science article, that might be a bit daunting without something to wash it down.

Satire Past

A 1970s look at today. The accuracy isn't so much in what the "today's" kids are doing as in the utter reluctance of the Boomers to let go of their sordid youth.

Ever.

I Wonder If They Do Samplers

God, this is like those appalling coffee bars. Do I want a skinny grande latte with dry foam or a double tall cappuccino with a vanilla shot or do I dare ask for "Coffee"?