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Cluster Magazine Issue #06
Cluster Magazine Article 2006
I started writing the Tales of Future Past web site in 2003 because I’ve always been interested in the future as it wasn’t, but should have been. Things have changed since the middle of the 20th century. Then we had a future. Okay, we still have one today — unless someone isn’t telling me something, but our future is very different from the one envisioned in, say, 1950. Back then, the future wasn’t tomorrow; it was a brave, new scientific world with its own distinct architecture where people dressed differently, talked differently, ate differently, and even thought differently. It was a place where scientists were wizards, machines were magically effective and efficient, tyrants were at least romantically evil rather than banal, and the heavens were fairyland where dreams could literally come true.
A few years ago, people talked about building a bridge to the 21st century. Now that we’re there, the phrase seem as odd as building a causeway to five o’clock. As midnight brought in the year 2000 (or 2001 if you prefer), something odd began to sink in. For people of my generation, who had lived through the tarnished promises of the Atomic Age, the Space Age, the Computer Age, and the This That and Another Age, the year 2001 was a gateway. We had waited twenty, thirty, forty years or more to pass though that gateway into a time when spaceships the size of ocean liners plied between colonised planets, where cities were colourful collections of brand new towers without a single old building or blade of grass, where people wore jumpsuits like they were the togas of a technocratic Rome, where robots were our powerful and obedient servants, and where jetpacks were as common as galoshes.
Boy, were we off base. It isn’t simply that the predictions were wrong. No one with half a brain expected that sort of accuracy. Some marvels that were predicted did not come to pass, and others that weren’t did. But what did not happen is what many expected, though never talked about much. Assuming that we dodged the 1984, Brave New World bullet, our future was supposed to be a sort of technocratic, atomic-powered, computer-controlled, antiseptic, space-travelling Jerusalem that would at last free us from the curse of Eden and original sin. We expected some how, some way that we would be on the road to being freed from the human condition. We expected a sort of bloodless, benign French Revolution with Hugo Gernsback as our Voltaire and Arthur C. Clarke as our Robespierre. And what did we get? The City of Man with Tivo. The fact is that science fiction and popular science had set the bar so high that only the Second Coming with ray guns would have satisfied us.
Still, there was a romantic innocence about the 20th century’s view of the future that I wanted to preserve and pass on to a new generation. It’s easy enough to laugh at things like hovercars, robot policemen, flying buses, sleep teachers, and teleyeglasses, but are we more sophisticated because we sneer at them, or poorer because we’ve forgotten how to dream?