Goodbye, Space Child: the space age's bureaucratic dreams sputtered out.

• Author: Freund, Charles Paul

Anybody seen Space Child lately? You surely remember him: He was the big-eyed icon of a transcendent tomorrow, the trans-evolutionary infant who appears at the end of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), after the big cosmic light show.

Space Child once stared out at us, it seemed, from all over the place, especially from the future. But that was decades ago. Is he gone? If so, his obit should note that he didn't exactly die; he just failed to be born. The future that he presaged lost its meaning and evaporated, negating his existence.

When did such a thing happen? It happened when the Space Age became a part of the past.

Where's My Space Age? demands a new book by Sean Topham (Prestel). The heavily illustrated work is about, as the subtitle puts it, "the rise and fall of futuristic design." It concerns itself not with Space Child, but with spacey graphic art, spacey fashion, spacey architecture, and so on. Yet Topham believes that "art and culture have always reflected the public's mixed emotions" about the space era, whether awe (at its achievements) or repulsion (at its Cold War motivations). Bit by bit, toy-box illustration by comic-book cover by metallic dress by modular house, Topham offers us the now-obsolete material evidence of anticipation, the stuff Space Child would have eventually unloaded at a garage sale before moving into an assisted-living facility.

Here, for example, is a tattered wrapper from Man on the Moon chewing gum and an old box of Space Patrol candy n the form of "sweet cigarettes." Maybe you missed those (Russia produced a line of tobacco cigarettes named for its space dog, Laika.)

But here's something no one who lived through the period missed: It's the sleeve from The Tornadoes' 1962 instrumental hit "Telstar," the first release by a British group to h t No. 1 on the U.S. Top 40. (The group's bassist reported y became a bakery deliveryman, a little fable, perhaps, of unfulfilled tomorrows.)

If you were born too late for The Tornadoes, you can land at Los Angeles international airport and check out its "futuristic" Theme Building, a remaining echo of space design that survived its obsolescence and has now achieved nostalgia.

The Space Age is hardly the only future that didn't happen Magazines like Popular Science and Mechanix Illustrated are troves of misdirected speculation about how various optimistic futures would look and how they would work. Misdirection...