Where's My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived
Daniel H. Wilson
Blackstone Audio
Nonfiction, Humorous Nonfiction/Science
Themes: Airborn Adventures, Cross-Genre, Robots, Seafaring Stories, Space Stories, Urban Tales
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Description
Moon colonies, flying cars, robot servants, ray guns... the Golden Age of science fiction promised us all these things and more by the year 2000. We're several years past that, and so far, science has not delivered our personal jetpacks or hoverboards. What gives? Scientists had one job, after all: give us our Jetsons future. The author, a roboticist, runs down several amazing predictions and what happened to keep them from coming to pass... or, at least, coming to pass as part of everyday casual life.
Review
Any book on "future" tech is bound to age iffily. This one, published in 2007, already feels almost quaint.
Nevertheless, it does what it set out to do: with a humorous spin, it explores the fates of a selection of sci-fi
staples. Many are (or were at the time) much closer to fruition than is apparent, while others fell victim to
exorbitant costs (and/or lack of sufficient interest or return on investment to make it worth pursuing), or thus
far are still basically impossible (such as revival from a cryonic state). Instantaneous transportation, in the
vein of Star Trek's transporter beams, has actually occurred... but only at subatomic levels. Weapons that
might be deemed "ray" guns have been developed, even if they aren't the retro-looking casual sidearm of many a
fantastic space adventurer. Underwater colonization hasn't happened (yet), but at least one submerged hotel exists,
or did as of this book's original publication. Thought-controlled robotics and prosthetics are still not universal
but are doing more and more impressive things. Moving sidewalks and "people movers" have found some real-world
applications. And robot "pets" were already being explored.
In the years since Where's My Jetpack? was published, some tech has leapfrogged those here; smartphones,
for instance, seem to be taking up the cause of the "universal translator" better than the dedicated portable
device Wilson describes. A few other predictions, unfortunately, have fallen victim to reality; we still have not
sent a manned presence back to the moon, which Wilson excitedly predicted was supposed to happen in 2018 by
original NASA timelines. (I might also mention that the growing contributions of nations other than America,
Russia, England, and the European Union were also apparently not predicted, or not generally mentioned; I'm
writing this mere days after India became the fourth nation to successfully land an unmanned mission on the moon
- just after Russia's effort failed.) He also seemed blissfully unaware of what climate collapse would do to the
potential tourism draws of those underwater hotels; bleached and lifeless coral reefs just aren't quite what most
tourists have in mind.
While I can't exactly blame it for aging, the presentation itself often gets too clever for its own good, offering
thin glimpses of a given subject that gloss over a lot of material or nuance; even in old sci-fi, not all
predictions were equal, with different authors offering different tech with different implementations, some more
plausible than others. (And, seriously, no Asimov in either the "robot buddy" section or the "city-in-a-skyscraper"
section?) He also seems reluctant to explore the drawbacks of a given tech that also play roles in keeping them out
of the public eye (or not, as we've seen in the case of self-driving cars that keep being pushed onto public
streets despite ample evidence of them not being ready for prime time, or skyscrapers that are growing so tall that
they become death traps in the way predicted by Towering Inferno). It often seemed like Wilson was more
interested in being funny than being informative and thought-provoking, and I found the humor a bit hit-and-miss
myself. (I think the target audience of this book was that envisioned by most Golden Age sci-fi authors: almost
exclusively young men, American or English or otherwise "light". The idea that anyone else might be interested in
sci-fi still seems inconceivable to too many people... but I digress.)
Overall, while some of the entries are intriguing, I wished for fewer jokes and more substance.