Yesterday's Tomorrow

Another glance at some futuristic inventions from fiction that have come into real existence, in this case from the cartoon series THE JETSONS:

5 Things from "The Jetsons" That Actually Exist

While middle-class families still don't have flying cars (much less a two-day work week that counts as full time or homes in cities above the clouds), we've caught up with the Jetsons in several respects. The article lists video calls, flat-screen televisions, robot vacuum cleaners, tanning beds, and ingestible, wireless, pill-shaped cameras. But they don't mention holograms, another technology brought to life in the decades since THE JETSONS.

One of Isaac Asimov's stories predicts pocket calculators, with the intriguing though rather implausible outcome of their omnipresence that even professional mathematicians have lost the skill of performing basic arithmetic on their own. Another story, "The Fun They Had," postulates remote schooling through computers, taught by AI programs instead of human teachers. J. D. Robb's mid-21st-century "In Death" mysteries have featured handheld devices called "links," essentially the same as present-day tablets or smart phones, since the beginning of the long-running series, well before such personal electronics existed in real life. Her flying cars and fully humanoid droid servants, though, seem as distant from practical commercial application as ever. Admittedly, however, some personal care robots currently produced in Japan show droid-like potential. Consider the over-optimism of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. We didn't get commercial shuttle travel to a permanent lunar base in 2001 in the primary-world timeline, and we still aren't there. No HAL-type self-conscious computers, either. Robert Heinlein anticipated video calls on personal computers in STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. Yet the world of his HAVE SPACE SUIT, WILL TRAVEL combines moon bases and lunar tourism with -- slide rules. And I WILL FEAR NO EVIL pairs subcutaneous contraceptive implants for women with the inconvenience of waiting several days for a pregnancy test report, not necessary even when the book was published. (The waits arose from lab backups, not limitations in the test itself.) Even brilliant science fiction authors can display blind spots as to the possibilities of technological advancement.

It's amusing to notice future-set stories with space-age technology alongside social customs frozen in the time period of their writing. Although office drone George Jetson and his housewife spouse are obviously played for laughs, Heinlein seems quite serious with the 1950s-style drugstore soda fountain in HAVE SPACE SUIT, WILL TRAVEL.

Margaret L. Carter

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