From sky flivver to Hydropolis: what happened to the science-fiction future?

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine

IF THIS IS the future, someone forgot to stock it properly. Where are the personal service robots, the moon vacations, the self-contained cities rising out of the smog? What happened to all those sci-fi prophecies? In Where's My Jetpack? (Bloomsbury), Popular Mechanics columnist Daniel Wilson moans that "it's the twenty-first century, and things are a little disappointing." Wilson, the author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising, begs "all the scientists, inventors, and tinkerers out there" to "please burry up" (emphasis in original).

Wilson shouldn't be so moony. Fanciful futurist visions can obscure all the neat stuff we've accumulated, once-wild innovations that are far cooler and more functional than jetpacks. (Microwave ovens, anyone?) They also make it easy to forget that the ultimate responsibility for choosing which technologies fill our lives lies with us, the ordinary consumers, more than any rocket scientists. Take the titular jetpack. It exists--but no one really wants it. It's a 125-pound monster with a flight time of 30 seconds, powered by expensive fuel The dream of individual human flight was realized in 1961 and we haven't been able to find any use for it outside of Bond movies, the first Super Bowl halftime show, and Ovaltine commercials.

We may not have the moving sidewalks of ever-increasing speed described by Robert Heinlein in his 1940 story "The Roads Must Roll." But we do have escalators. With Heinlein's dream of a begoggled pedestrian commuting at 100 miles an hour dancing in your head, pokey old escalators may not seem like much of a consolation. But in 1898, when Harrods department store in London unveiled its newly installed automated stairs, employees had brandy and smelling salts on hand to treat shoppers suffering from the shock of the new.

If you're not sold on the glories of escalators, consider the progress we've made toward one fanciful vision presented at the 1964 New York World's Fair: underwater dwellings. As I write, there are about 100 luxury submarines plying the seas. Average folks with a yen to join the Five Fathom Club can save themselves the cost of maintaining a private sub by booking a couple of nights off the coast of Key Largo, Florida, at the former underwater lab now known as Jules' Undersea Lodge. From there, you can scuba dive to your heart's content and amuse yourself in the evenings however you see fit. If nosy cetaceans are a problem--and apparently they will be, as there's been a rash...