Since I seem to be time-travelling today anyhow (I’ve already been to 1999 and 1976), let’s take a moment to consider the future…
Or rather, let’s consider the future that didn’t materialize. As I’ve lamented before, the 21st Century we’re now living in doesn’t look much like the one we were promised when I was a kid, the occasional real-life rocketship notwithstanding. A recent book review by Simon Reynolds on Salon.com makes it clear that I’m not the only one who feels diasappointed:
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
Reynolds’ ostensible purpose in writing is to review a new book called Where’s My Jetpack? A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived by Daniel H. Wilson, but he devotes most of his attention to exploring the history of future studies and how our big expectations have eroded bit by bit:
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.
Sometimes it feels as if progress itself has actually slowed down, with the 1960s as the climax of a 20th century surge of innovation, and the decades that followed consisting of a weird mix of consolidation, stagnation and rollback.
…
Today we seem to have trouble picturing the future, except in cataclysmic terms or as the present gone worse (Children of Men). Our inability to generate positive and alluring images of tomorrow’s world has been accompanied by the fading prominence of futurology as a form of popular nonfiction.
Reynolds ultimately doesn’t think much of the book he’s reviewing, but his insights about the subject in general are well worth reading. He articulates most of my own thinking and leaves me wishing I’d gotten around to writing about this first.
I also wish that people, including myself, were still excited about the march of progress, rather than apprehensive or indifferent to it. The future used to be a much friendlier and more exciting place…
[Ed. note: The links in the quoted material above are mine, not Reynolds’. I thought I’d do a little public service for those Loyal Readers who didn’t live and breathe this stuff growing up, the way I did.]
