Dead futures
I have nostalgia for futures of the past. During the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about futurism, in part because I’m deep into planning my blog about futurism and science fiction for the Gawker Network. And I realized that when I think of the future, I almost always start by thinking about how people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries thought about it — whether that was in essays (think Aldous Huxley or Henry Adams), or in fiction (I think of Frankenstein as the first true science fiction novel).
I mourn the dead futures of history, the zeppelin-powered transportation systems of the 1920s that never happened and the stillborn ecotopias of the 1970s. I’m sad that we still haven’t colonized the stars, the way futurists have been predicting for over 100 years. And what about all those predictions, starting in the 1920s, that someday soon we’d have robot companions? I don’t think iRobot vacuum cleaners count. Read more about the tragedy of lost futures.
August 1st, 2007 at 12:43 pm
I think this is part of the draw of the Steampunk design style & renewed popularity of Mid-Century Mod. Possibly looking back to times with “Technology Will Save Us” futures as a way to invoke a Technology Will save Us future?
August 2nd, 2007 at 9:10 am
Yeah, I think that’s right. I just bought a fantastic coffee table book about futures of the past by two Minneapolis writers called Follies of Science — highly recommended! It’s full of great reproductions of old images and advertisements, as well as some good commentary.
August 3rd, 2007 at 10:01 pm
This is why I love “The Gernsback Continuum,” and why I recommend reading it to friends of mine who have even a cursory interest in SF…