Historical humor

A new genre! Good stuff, through and through. Great anecdotes of predictions gone wrong. Someone needs to hold these futurist accountable, otherwise we're likely to get more of them. ( )

Ought to have some pictures ( and actually would work better as a blog/website ), but some good survey information ( )

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Talking dolphins . . . Underwater cities . . . Two-hundred-year life spans . . . Welcome to the present!

People have always imagined what life would be like in the future. Most of the time they've been wrong. Often they were really, really wrong. Your Flying Car Awaits looks at the most outrageous predictions from twentieth-century scientists, novelists, and social commentators, detailing the technologies and philosophies that led some great (and not so great)minds to think the ridiculous was achievable. Includes phenomenally inaccurate predictions such as:

Space tourism will be ubiquitous by the year 2000
Nuclear explosives will be used for commercial demolition
Engineered and man-made oceans will cover the planet
Weather will be as predictable and controllable as a train schedule

An eye-opening, fascinating, and endlessly entertaining collection of truly boneheaded scientific predictions from the past hundred years, Your Flying Car Awaits shines an illuminating light on the people of the previous century by examining the ridiculous theories they envisioned about this one.

My Review: A fast-paced, entertaining overview of how Today was supposed to look. The author's narrative voice is conversational, so reading the book is like barstool/family room sofa beer-fueled chats with your best buddy.

In my youth, predating the author's by a decade or so, I loved finding the old issues of Popular Mechanix and the others of that stripe in my father's pack-rat piles or the library's musty old boxes. The illustrations on the covers...! Oh, and the headlines: "You Will Have Robot Slaves by 1965!" "First Moonbase by 1970!" "Mars is Ours!"

The future was such a cool place back then. I was looking forward to flying TWA to the Moon Marriott. I couldn't wait to board the Concorde, which I got to do one round trip in the 1990s...noisy damned thing. It was the closest I ever got to anything I saw in the magazines. The beautiful turbine cars! The personal copters!

*sigh* Reality sucks.

But one thing I can truthfully say I'm delighted has not come to pass: Flying cars. Most people can't drive the ground cars they have with anything like expertise. Put 'em in charge of something heavy, unstable, and 500ft in the air...the mind boggles.

Another area of contention that was predicted to be a Wild West bonanza: designer babies whose genes were totally under the parents' control. It seems to be an area that makes all the atavistic need for control of our bodies go on Red Alert. Even though the possibility of ending most birth defects through gene therapy is on the horizon, in a world with anti-vaccine loopy goofs it seems likely that we'll be in for another round of silly, time-consuming arguments about "just because we can doesn't mean we should." *yawn*

All in all, reading this light essay on man's hubris in assuming he can predict the future was entertaining, enjoyable, and time I felt was well-spent. ( )

Ought to have some pictures ( and actually would work better as a blog/website ), but some good survey information ( )

Indeholder "Introduction", "1. Our Bodies, Ourselves", "2. Getting There", "3. Scarcity and Other Disasters", "4. Space: Still the Final Frontier", "5. Nuclear Fusion, Weather Control, and Other Technical Marvels", "6. Home Sweet Home", "7. Living, Loving, Earning, and Learning", "8. A Global Perspective: Domestic and International Politics", "9. The World Will End ... Pretty Soon", "Afterword", "Acknowledgements".
Forfatteren mindes sine yngre dage (han er fra 1969) og forudsigelser om flyvende biler og helikoptere i baghaven. Han kigger på mere seriøst mente forudsigelser og finder også her absurde ting, som han underholder læseren med.
Kapitel 1 fortæller om feberfantasier om at forlænge levetiden på den ene eller anden måde.
Kapitel 2 er jetturbinebiler, flyvende biler og hovercraftbiler.
Kapitel 3 er mangel på olie/vand/mad osv.
Kapitel 4 er rumrejser, der aldrig rigtig har rykket siden månerejserne.
Kapitel 5 er fusion, der er lige om hjørnet om 20 år hele tiden og kontrol med vejret, men det var nu ikke så let.
Kapitel 6 er underlige ideer om hvordan vi vil bo og mere eller mindre forkerte gæt på hvor store eller små byer bliver.
Kapitel 7 handler mest om arbejdstid, men helt uden refleksioner over hvorfor 40 timer skulle være et helligt tal.
Kapitel 8 handler om mange gæt på sovjet/USA/Kina som har været helt galt på den.
Kapitel 9 er dommedagsprofetier og fx Jehovas vidner er svære at tage alvorligt efter læsningen. Johannes åbenbaring bliver også analyseret og formentlig var antikrist romerriget og det må jo siges at være besejret.
Til sidst er der et kapitel med Condorset og Jules Verne, som har ramt meget præcist selv med et par hundrede års afstand.

Desværre ser bogen ud til at have været sjovere at skrive end at læse. ( )