Salon is carrying a long, thoughtful review of Daniel H. Wilson's Where's My Jetpack? A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived, a book that sounds entirely up my line. Daniel wrote the classic How to Survive a Robot Uprising, and is a hell of a nice guy besides. I imagine that this kicks all kinds of ass.
A glib and flippant tone dominates "Where's My Jetpack?" but I get the feeling a more serious book is struggling to extricate itself from Wilson's arch and camp approach (something compounded by Richard Horne's kitschy retrofuturist illustrations). The research is top-notch and fascinating. Some of the best material here entails a sort of archaeology of stillborn or prematurely abandoned futures. In the 1960s, for instance, concerted attempts were made to build living environments at the bottom of the ocean, in the form of the U.S. Navy's Sealab program. But instead of aquadome cities nestling on the ocean floor and a massive exodus of pioneers emigrating to settle the briny depths, all that remains today of the dream is a solitary subaquatic hotel, the Jules Undersea Lodge, located just off Key Largo, Fla. Other science fiction staples that made a tantalizingly brief appearance decades ago but never caught on, for reasons either practical or cultural, include the jetpack (the energy required for blast-off generates dangerous levels of heat) and Smell-O-Vision. The latter idea was mooted fictionally in Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel, "Brave New World," in which the "feelies" stimulated one's tactile and olfactory sense as well as sight and sound. The idea was actually attempted a couple of times in the early '60s, but both times tanked in the marketplace.
Another classic futuristic idea made real is "cultured meat," i.e., animal protein grown in the laboratory, where, Wilson reports, it is repeatedly stretched as a surrogate for physical exercise, in order to give it the texture of a living, active organism. This grotesque technology was memorably anticipated in Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth's 1952 novel "The Space Merchants," a corporate dystopia of the 21st century in which peon workers hack slices off a gigantic blob of animate but nonsentient poultry breast called Chicken Little. But in our nonfictional 21st century, the idea languishes in the laboratory thanks to consumer resistance. Our cultural biases reject cultured meat as gross, unnatural, an abomination. Indeed, popular taste is trending the opposite way, toward the organic, the uncaged, the nonprocessed.
