yogi

When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait for the future to arrive. The world of the twenty-first century promised to be a kind of technologically enchanted wonderland, sort of an Oz with robots instead of Munchkins. Okay, okay, there was always the chance that we would nuke ourselves back into the Stone Age, but stories about the apocalypse made up just a small fraction of the SF books, comics, and TV shows that I and millions of other impressionable youngsters were exposed to. We expected to grow up into a shiny and well-engineered future that ran at supersonic speed on clean atomic power. And by the day after tomorrow, humanity was supposed to be just a step away from the stars.

At this point in human history we are, I fear, not quite so bedazzled by the future. My fellow Baby Boomers, as well as the GenXers, the Millennials, and even fifth graders of all stripes, have reason to be concerned about what is to come. It is a measure of our plight that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ dreaded Doomsday Clock, which during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 stood at seven minutes to midnight, today has been pushed up to five minutes until that fateful hour, the figurative midnight being the moment we will obliterate ourselves. Although nukes are as much a threat as ever, they have pretty much dropped off our cultural radar, given our other problems. These days we have climate change on our minds, not to mention environmental degradation, mass extinction, and depletion of fossil fuels. In fact, there is so much to worry about that many of us have become numb to our danger.

Oops. Sorry if I spoiled your lunch.

It is not only that the future is scary, but that it is also pretty much unpredictable, as Vernor Vinge and the Singularity crowd have pointed out. Or rather, we now realize how hard the next fifty years will be to predict, whereas many of our SF forebearers, writing in the aftermath of World War II, blithely described the dawn of the upcoming century as if they were looking over the fence into their next door neighbor’s backyard. They wrote in a time before the Civil Rights Act here in the States, the empowerment of women, the gay rights movement, the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of China, and the reawakening of Islam. Who really understood the difficulty and expense of sending humans to orbit, much less to Alpha Centauri? When John F. Kennedy called for a national effort to put a man on the moon, did any SF writer or futurist predict that we would quickly accomplish this spectacular feat and then abandon the moon for thirty-seven years—and still counting? Even those who glimpsed the edges of the digital revolution failed to imagine the economic and cultural upheavals that the internet and ubiquitous computing would cause.

Small wonder that for some, to quote the immortal Yogi Berra, “The future ain’t what it used to be.”

nostalgia

At least one institution concerned with predicting the future has given up the task as pretty much hopeless. Last year Washington Post staff writer Joel Garreau visited Disneyland’s new Tomorrowland attraction, the Innoventions Dream Home and wrote a smart cultural commentary entitled “The Future Is So Yesterday”. He found Disney’s house of the future to be kind of retro, filled with tech that is more or less available right now, like flat screen TVs and voice activated talking computers. As Garreau notes:

“But this is absolutely not the future in the research pipeline. No genetically modified critters here that eat carbon dioxide and poop gasoline. No nanobots smaller than blood cells, cruising our bodies to zap cancer. No brain implants that expand our memory. No cellphones that translate Chinese. No dragonfly-size surveillance bots, no pills that shut off the brain’s trigger to sleep, no modified mitochondria sustaining our energy while making obesity as quaint as polio.”

He argues that this diverges from Walt Disney’s original futurist vision for Tomorrowland, which borrowed its conceit from the New York World’s Fair of 1939. Twenty-five years later, when another World’s Fair opened in New York, Disney’s fingerprints were all over it, which featured Tomorrowland-like tours of the future as conceived by the engineers of Ford and General Electric.

Danny Hillis, who once served as a vice president for research at Disney Imagineering, and who is now co-chairman of the Long Now Foundation, commented on the new retro Tomorrowland on the Long Now’s blog: “. . . we are nostalgic for a time when we believed in the future. People miss the future. There’s a yearning for it. Disney does know what people want. People want to feel some connectedness to the future. The way Disney delivers that is to reach back in time a little bit to the past when they did feel connected.”

retro cool

The impulse to imagine historical do-overs has ever been present in science fiction. After all, what are alternate history and steampunk? If the future is too scary or unknowable or weird, why not step back in time to a safe remove and re-envision it? As David Zondy of the website Tales of Future Past writes, “It wasn’t that long ago that we had a future. I mean, we have one now; the world isn’t going to crash into the Sun or anything like that. What I mean is that we had a future that we could clearly imagine.” Zondy’s site is organized around tours of the future as depicted by the mass media of the last century. Take a peek at developments in flight, housing, culinary arts, and urban life that you will have missed because they never happened. Try out the “latest robots,” death rays, cars, and space ships. This site is a blast!

There are a lot of retro transportation sites on the web, but none more comprehensive than Transportation Futuristics. My favorite vehicle on this site is the Curtiss-Wright hovercar, a fifties vision of hot red and yellow steel. Why didn’t it ever get to the market? Check out these specs: it had a top speed of fifty mph and gulped twenty gallons of aviation fuel per hour—even when hovering at a red light. At 2.5 mpg, it makes a Hummer look like a Prius!

The mission of the excellent Retro-Futurismus is to “demonstrate to readers from Germany and Austria the wealth of visionary thinking in these countries during the past.” Alas, only the front page has been translated into English, but even those who don’t speak German can make use of the links. Of particular interest are the videos culled from YouTube in a variety of languages.

For the very latest from the retro future, click over to the Paleo-Future blog, which bills itself as “A look into the future that never was.” It’s the creation of Matt Novak, who scours the net for items of interest for retro fans. His posts are organized by decade, so you read about the noted Professor Plantamour who in 1873 predicted that Plantamour’s Comet would collide with the earth in 2011, or open to Nevada State Journal for September 21, 1919, wherein experts predicted that giant airships would someday make the New York to London run in two days, or learn that in 1955 then United States Treasurer Ivy Baker Priest predicted that half of Congress would be female by the year 2000. (Currently there are 441 male members of the U.S. Congress and 92 female).

Without doubt the best site examining the records of SF writers as futurists is the wonderful Technovelgy.com, the creation of one Bill Christensen, who, like so many of the unsung heroes of the net, has turned an idiosyncratic passion into an invaluable resource. Technovelgy isn’t exactly a retro site, but insofar as Mr. Christensen has created an index of science fiction inventions and ideas dating as far back as 1634, he has documented our successes and failures more comprehensively than anyone else I know. The site is marvelously useful, with inventions, authors, and novels cross-indexed for easy reference. A warning, however, to my fellow genre typists: click here at your peril. You know that shiny new idea you have for your next magnum opus? Somebody beat you to it!

And if any of you is hankering for the retro apocalypse, grab your laptop, duck and cover under your desk and click over to Conelrad: All Things Atomic. The tribute to the “Golden Age of Homeland Security” is a treasure trove of Cold War culture. Thrill to the Top One Hundred Atomic Films and groove to finger snapping hits ranging from “Agnes (The Teenage Russian Spy)” to “Your Atom Bomb Heart.”

exit

After rereading the opening of this column, I imagine that some might misinterpret my position on futurist science fiction. Lest anyone think I am claiming the superiority of my own predictions to those of my betters of the Golden Age, let the record show that my prognostications have been just as wonky as anyone else’s. Most SF practitioners recognize that our stories have sell-by dates and will inevitably be overtaken by events. Which leads me to propose a genre law (I have always aspired to have a law named after me!):
Kelly’s Law: All futures will someday be retro.