Preface: “Now Read on… into the Fantastic World of the Future!”
That’s how each of the three sections (Robots, Future Cities, Star Travel!) of The Usborne Book of the Future begin. Written by Kenneth Gatland and David Jefferis, it was published in 1979, and it was one of my favorite books when I was growing up (some page spreads from the book are featured in this post).
Nothing dates faster than the future. And you can certainly play that game with The Book of the Future, subtitled A Trip in Time to the Year 2000 and Beyond. So no, our houses don’t yet have automated servants handing out trays of drinks, and there aren’t robot forest firefighters. Or everyday Space Shuttle flights, space elevators, factories in Earth orbit, or massive domed cities, let alone an Olympics on the Moon (anticipated for 2020). Many of the timescales for supposed technologies-to-come are way off, if they happen at all, although maybe one day we will inhabit cities in space (indeed, some of today’s big tech billionaires seem to be counting on it).
But what I realize now is that, even though it was a book for children and some of its predictions didn’t come to pass, in other respects the future was contained in its pages, and I had seen it all the way back then.
As The Book of the Future foresaw, we do carry minicomputers in our pockets, much more powerful than the ‘risto’ watches it featured, and our homes are full of networked gadgets. Robots have “increasingly take[n] over the jobs of skilled engineers in factories.” Artificial intelligence is advancing into our lives. Shopping is increasingly online (The Book of the Future confidently predicted that TVs will be “used to order shopping via a computerized shopping center a few kilometers away”). Electric vehicles will eventually become widespread (the book predicted an “almost totally electric world”). Computerized weapons systems are shaping the future of war. “Electronic conferencing” is finally common (prompted by the pandemic, not merely because of presumed “convenience”). And some people are experimenting with sea-borne living, akin to the floating pyramid cities featured in the book.
That it got at least some of these predictions largely right isn’t surprising. The Book of the Future was based on the research of scientists and organizations including Bell Aerospace, Boeing, and NASA, alongside Arthur C. Clarke and Omni magazine (co-author Kenneth Gatland was also a leading spaceflight theorist). But there were other things about the possible future that the book spent much less time discussing – with one important exception.
I was born in 1971. The generation before me, some of them at least, could still be excited about the future. As in The Book of the Future, they could plausibly believe they might one day become space tourists, as well as find ways to eliminate poverty, crime, war, and disease here on Earth. A generation later, as a child I still read comics about daring space adventurers, but I knew they had a decidedly retro, 1950s feel to them. They were yesterday’s future, not the actual future.
This was because, as I grew up, the actual future seemed to get darker, it was darker: the possibility of nuclear annihilation in the Second Cold War, demonstrations, strikes, mass unemployment, increasing inequality, and the growing sense, as the punk movement put it, of ‘no future.’
As we’ll see, this was reflected – and predicted – in fiction as well. From the late 1960s onwards, there was a new adultness in science fiction, including at the movies. Technical advances in filmmaking helped, but the real progress was in the subject matter: there was much less fantasy about aliens, and much more fatalism about humanity and its future (or possible lack of it).
Today, young people may be even more anxious about what’s to come. Unfortunately, it’s probably worse than most of them imagine. In their future, they could see civilization – at least in its present, somewhat predictable form – collapse, due to everything from climate change to wars over dwindling resources. In some of its most fundamental warnings, the more adult, dystopian sci-fi of the 1970s is fast turning into fact. This is partly what this book is about.
To understand what happened to the future, we have to go back to when I was young, to a point when two very different futures were still possible and the choice between them was being made. In between its easy-to-mock certainty about coming Lunar Olympics and interstellar starships, it was this critical choice that The Book of the Future really got right. What really strikes me looking back at (and at the time, as I remember), is its double-page spread titled “Two trips to the 21st century”, and the stark contrast it presents between a “Garden city on a cared-for planet” and a “Polluted city of a dying world.”
In the latter, there’s over-population, vehicles trundle along still powered by gasoline (alternative energies were not pursued), the environment is dying (fake plastic trees line the roads), the air is a chokingly thick brown-orange (pedestrians wear gas masks), the brutalist urban infrastructure is decaying, and people are out of work and under-fed. But in the former, fumeless hydrogen and electric powered vehicles glide through a refurbished, greenified city, beneath monorails and alongside walking and cycling lanes. The air is fresh spring blue, the plants and trees are vibrant green.
There were two possible futures back then, it said, one darkly dystopian, the other much brighter – not a whizzy 1950s Jetsons-style techno-utopia, but still a pretty good one.
What I know now, and we’ll discuss in this book, is that these two possible futures were based on predictions set out in landmark publications like The Limits to Growth, published just a few years before in 1972. And we’ll examine how, contrary to their fierce critics at the time, the predictions made in these publications are increasingly coming true.
We didn’t heed these warnings, or those depicted in popular culture pretty much ever since. Fundamentally, this book is about why. The short answer is that, starting in the 1970s, an organized and well-funded campaign was mounted against recognizing, let alone doing anything serious about, the threats we faced, and it largely succeeded in persuading people that the future would effectively take care of itself.
Indeed, we’ll see how it was these predictions, both in fiction and non-fiction, of a dark future that helped to propel – in some ways helped to create – a new political movement, which until the 1970s had been relatively marginalized. What’s been neglected in many previous histories is how this movement’s attractive promises – that there were no limits to growth, and that technology would solve the major problems we face – were crucial in bringing them, and a new type of politician, to power. And so we set off towards one of the two futures depicted in my children’s book – the wrong one.
We can’t say we weren’t warned, including by some of the best science fiction films of the past fifty years, which we’ll use here to discuss what’s going to happen next. We’ll also uncover the sometimes surprising yet hidden-in-plain-sight meanings of these films – meanings that are, however else some of these films might seem dated, now more relevant than ever (inevitably, there are major spoilers for the films).
Of course, the films represent a personal collection of favorites, and, I hope, a pretty good selection based on their predictive power, for their ability to foresee the future. They’re also a way of telling the story presented here, of how we lost the future, or rather how it was taken from us. Indeed, at times they become part of the story; in some cases their warnings were (and still are) dismissed as alarmist, even part of a progressive ‘plot’ to end progress and immiserate millions. Obviously, their inclusion here is intended to indicate that they got more fundamentally right than wrong.
It’s not the future their creators wanted then, or we want now (most of us, anyway). But the more we understand what’s coming, the more we might be able to prepare for it.
So, read on, not into the fantastic, but definitely into the dramatic, world of the future.
Come With Me If You Want To Live: The Future as Foretold in Classic Sci-Fi Films, is out in November from Lexington Books. You can read more about it here.