Futures Past

How different things could have been. I could have gone to work today by rocket pack, landed right outside my forty-storey office overshadowing St. Paul’s Cathedral, stuck a self-igniting cigarette into my mouth and walked right into the glass and chrome honeycombed structure without being gunned down by armed health and safety officials. Hell, everyone on my floor would have been smoking, and they would all have been men in their late forties (the higher ranking ones favouring a pipe). I would have slapped the backsides of a few of the secretaries in the Telecommunications Room on my way in (eliciting a playful giggle), but any real work to be done would be accomplished amongst other men.

There’d be one woman maybe in the office at the end, but she’d either be a doomed lesbian or one of The Chaps would be ‘working on her’ with the intention of truncating her silly career foibles and getting her to the altar and the kitchen in equally short order.

By way of amusement at the staff canteen, we chaps would spread jam on our compact discs and they would all play perfectly anyway; barely time for japes in any case, since lunch comes in capsule form, as does sex. After all, the boffins know best.

Back in my office, I would proudly regard the personal computer occupying most of the west wall in nine banks of whirring magnetic tapes and scoffing at lesser workers with computers that still run on vacuum tubes. I would smugly start my second pack of self-igniting smokes as I took a coffee pill and sneaked an idle reverie upon the glint from the clean lineaments of the East-West London monorail outside my self-cleaning window…

Churchill said that only one link of the chain of destiny can be handled at a time, but science-fiction futurists are always pulling ahead and losing their grip, since visions of the future are inevitably reflections on the present. Where there has been genuine prescience, the works in question have usually been contemporarily derided as the barmy abstractions of fantasists and/or have finally come to pass via cultural and technological milestones which the writer never imagined. In this field, there’s no profit in being right.

Last night I had the luxury of watching 2001: A Space Odyssey in the high-definition glory it has always deserved. For the first time since I coughed my way through it in London’s West End in the Winter of 1978, I could see all of Douglas Trumbull’s stars behind the spaceships, and even read the instructions on the zero-gravity toilet (you don’t want to know). Kubrick and Clarke’s visionary and clinical projection of a now-expired year retains its own integrity and glacial perfection even seven years past its sell-by date.

Sadder, though, was the accompanying 1966 documentary among the extras, where Arthur C. Clarke joins a load of other pipe-smoking suits in laying out the map to the stars for which 2001 was intended as the first herald: with the excitement of the space-race spurring mankind on to lunar colonies and eventual planetary migration, it was all too easy to dismiss or ignore the fact that (cold) war was sending us skyward; sadder yet to know that the then-erupting Vietnam conflict would eventually combine with the 1970s oil crisis and post-Watergate cynicism to rein back our horizons once more.

With presidents limited to two terms in office, the almost geologically slow pace of space exploration programmes found NASA fighting a series of oval-office sceptics with different and often conflicting agendas. The commercial need to deliver satellite payloads with reusable vehicles finally got the space shuttle launched in 1981, and Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ SDI programme meant that some pacific corollary research could at least be done in the name of blasting commie ICBMs out of the stratosphere…but it was all very far from booking a Pan Am shuttle to Tycho base.

And now? What remains of Kubrick’s dream of a mankind with a post-Terran vision of its own destiny? It’s rumoured that Sigourney Weaver is among the many well-heeled passengers to have paid £115,000 for a place on Virgin Galactic – a terrifying, small-windowed ride that will just about scrape the stratosphere and offers less zero-g time than you can get on NASA’s ‘vomit-comet’ (the space-flight simulator plane where they filmed the zero-g scenes in Apollo 13, and on which Stephen Hawking got a celebrated free ride last year). Still, it’s cheaper than the £20,000,000 that the Russians currently charge for a trip to their shack-in-the-sky.

While it was sad to see Arthur Clarke resigned to the loss of humanity’s great – but expensive – dream, it was amusing to see him wearing an ‘I Invented The Satellite’ t-shirt. He pretty much did, and his prediction of an orbital network of information relay stations came so hard on the reality that no-one really had time to mock. His other great prediction, made in the early 1960s, was that we would one day be able to call anywhere in the world for the price of a local call; this came to pass with VOIP, but seems threatened by traffic shaping and the collusion of global monopolies.

Faded visions of better futures than we actually got are actually more depressing than dystopian sci-fi, where you can at least count your lucky stars that it’s not that bad yet. This morning, I could have gotten up out of my radiation-shielded cave and gone looking round the ruins for a nine-eyed mutant wolf to flambé for lunch, and found myself being pursued by a herd of ten-foot cockroaches, cursing not again...

Martin writes his (mostly) sci-fi column every Friday at Den Of Geek.