Disposable Lit Reviews

Usborne, 1979
32 pp.
ISBN 0-86020-239-9
Buy it from
Amazon.com or
eBay or Half.com

As you’ve probably noticed, most of my activities around this site fall into one of two categories:

1) making up for a childhood that I found to be unfulfilling and not terribly fun; and

2) rediscovering those few parts of that same childhood that I enjoyed, but was too stupid to preserve.

Today’s book review falls into the second category.

Usborne Publishing did its darndest to make learning fun for British children (as well as those living in British Commonwealth countries where they were distributed like, for instance, Canada). Sure, I picked up some strange Britishisms — “lifts,” “storeys,” “colour,” etc. — but I still came out ahead for having Usborne Books all over my shelves.

This book, Future Cities, was part of a three-book World of the Future series which speculated, with plenty of high-quality illustrations, about the living conditions and arrangements to be had in the future. Now, I’ve always been very interested in the future because it’s where I’m going to spend the rest of my life, and all of my conceptions of the Shape of Things to Come were strongly influenced by the ideas, reasonable and not, advanced by these authors.

It begins with a quick overview of the entire idea of human habitations, from cliff dwellings and Neolithic construction through centrally-heated Roman villas, the urbanization of the Industrial Revolution, and the relatively-recent idea of planning out living arrangements before people actually show up on the scene.

From there, the book is roughly chronological, showing a good speculative timeline of how people could live, based on the path of technology and reasonable assumptions about the growing importance of space, energy efficiency, etc. Eventually we end up with terraforming Venus, constructing space stations within asteroids, and beginning work on a Dyson Sphere. All heady and exciting stuff for a kid who was eight years old when this book first landed in his lap.

But I’m not eight anymore, and what’s more, it’s not 1979; it’s the long-fabled Twenty-First Century! And while re-reading this book, I realized the degree to which we are, indeed, living in “The Future” we’d always imagined — but because of cosmetic differences and the incremental degree with which these innovations snuck up on us, we don’t realize that we’re living in the paradise of yesteryear’s SF fan.

Consider, for instance, this portrait of a living room of the (then) near future, illustrating the degree to which computers and computerized appliances would “revolutionise people’s living habits.”

Sure, people are lounging around in boringly-futuristic jumpsuits, but let’s take a look at some of the accoutrements that we’re already living with:

Check. (What this forecast misses is the importance of preserving widescreen aspect ratios, but that’s a niggling little detail.¹)

Just a spool of tape? You don’t say! Of course now, many consumer-grade digital camcorders are moving to flash memory, just like their still-photograph cousins. (Holo-TV, of course, is still a long way off, mostly because no one can figure out how it’s supposed to look.)

My question, at this point is — who, exactly, is this guy spying on? Bo, if only he had access to those spam-advertised spycams…

“And it will be called ‘Amazon.com.’”

And if you look really close, you can see that this guy’s shelfspace is occupied with seventeen different editions of the Evil Dead trilogy.

Whoops! So, not every prediction came true…

So “by 1990″ was a little over-optimistic — but on the other hand, we were smart enough to realize that using keyboards to type email is a helluva lot more efficient (and legible) than what essentiall amounts to faxing handwritten notes all over creation.

(And that video-phone on the endtable? Of course — how else is someone going to know just how snazzy your striped jumpsuit is?)

As always, it’s easy to make fun of prognostications gone awry after the fact, and that’s not my intention here. It’s simply interesting to see not only what went right, but what no one ever thought of while fantasizing that became patently obvious once someone had to make it work practically.

Case in point: There’s a two-paged spread on the convenience advantages of wristphones. Just about every feature listed is something we’re familiar with on cellphones these days — free emergency calls, GPS location, etc. But think of how annoying it would be if, instead of everyone on the sidewalk having their cellphone pressed to their ear, they were listening to speakers loud enough to be heard from their wrists. (The same hold true for every generation of Star Trek communicators, for that matter.)

I’m still waiting for the floating residential sea cities, and odds are I’ll never live to see the permanent moonbase (or the Moon-hosted Olympics of 2020), much less that Dyson sphere. But the great thing about having decades of science fictional speculation around is that you aren’t just stuck with the future that eventually comes to pass; you can still experience all the futures that didn’t quite make it.

Nathan Shumate

1. Yes, I know — to some of you, aspect ratio is all-important. Get over yourselves, will you? [back]