Fred's Book Club: The Shape of Things Not Yet Come.

Hello, kids, and welcome back to the Humpback Writers, the Wednesday book feature that isn't about writers with humpbacks, or even books with humpbacks. What is it about? Well, it's about half past seven on Wednesday, and that means it's Hump Day!

Today we're taking a little trip into the future. We are all interested in the future, because we will spend the rest of our lives there.

Actually, no -- we're taking a trip into 2007, when this book was published, asking the musical question:

Yes, Where's My Jetpack? is the thing all of us who grew up in the 20th century would like to know -- that or variations of it. "Where's my flying car?" "Where our Mars colony?" "Where's pre-buttered bread?" "Where's my robot butler?" "Where's Sealab?" "Where's the Jetsons' shower/dresser that gets you out of bed and ready for work in under twenty seconds?"

These are the kind of questions author Daniel H. Wilson, Ph.D., writer of fiction as well as of nonfiction books like this, has attempted to answer, and answer seriously. He explains in the introduction:

The future is now, and we are not impressed. The future was supposed to be a fully automated, atomic-powered, germ-free Utopia -- a place where a grown man could wear a velvet spandex unitard and not be laughed at. Our beloved scientists may be building the future, but some key pieces are missing. Where are the ray guns, the flying cars, and the hoverboards that we expected? We can't wait another minute for the future to arrive. The time has come to hold the golden age of science fiction accountable for its fantastic promises. 

This illustrated and well-made paperback then takes us on a tour of the most desired futuristic things that the public saw in science fiction but has found only in Nowheresville, No State, Population: Nothing. Daniel Wilson wants to tell us why.

It isn't enough to point out that in reality, flying cars would be a menace, because we drive crappily enough in two dimensions. Wilson brings us up to takeoff speed, summarizing the science needed not only to put hordes of personal aircraft aloft but to track and prevent collisions for them all. NASA was said to be leading the charge on this with automatic collision-avoidance technology and self-correcting flight controls. But the fact is, even if we get them, they are not going to be flying cars so much as inky-winky airplanes, because that futuristic anti-gravity stuff just isn't panning out yet.

The chapter on Smell-O-Vision is a minor classic, explaining how the sense of smell works and the history of people trying to monetize it the way movies and TV monetize the moving image. "One bankrupt company called DigiScents grabbed the market by the horns in 2000 and put out the iSmell device.... The small, plastic device generated odors by blending different 'scent primaries.' A collection of scented cartridges was heated in combination and the resulting smells pushed out by fan." Who wouldn't want that? Apparently everyone. Too bad; if it were able to generate all kinds of scents, it would have made a great tool for practical jokes.

I find one of Wilson's charms to be his knowledge of the history of science fiction. The chapter on the Moving Sidewalk not only mentions the 1964 World's Fair, but also Robert Heinlein's classic 1940 story "The Roads Must Roll," and even harks back even further to H.G. Wells's 1899 book When the Sleeper Wakes. Then he goes on to explain the problems with huge, perpetually moving roads and sidewalks that replace other forms of transportation, like people falling and dying (although he lists fictional and nonfictional answers to such problems). He does not, however, address the preposterous amount of energy needed to keep endless miles of conveyors running constantly -- really, "preposterous amount of energy needed" is probably the crushing problem behind so many of the things in the book.

(Another science-fiction dream, the Space Elevator, may not be known to the general public but would be awesome -- and, Wilson notes, may be closer than we think.)

In some cases, the profile takes a tentative step toward the futuristic item at hand, but can get no closer. The chapter on Food Pills details the many things trending toward instant, artificial foods, like microwave ovens and lab-grown "cultured meat," but this doesn't get us to the real idea of a food pill -- a capsule that contains all needed nutrients that by itself can provide sustenance to the human body as long as an actual meal. Wilson talks about the military's development of MREs, and the experimental CM, or Compressed Meal. ("A CM is one third the size and weight of an MRE but has the same number of calories. At this rate the food pill may be on the menu soon.") But we're left with doubts -- and maybe wondering why we wanted this thing in the first place.

The chapter on Ray Guns is fun, because sure enough the Pentagon has got a few of those daddies, sort of. Lasers, pulse laser guided lightning shooters, microwave beams, lots of good stuff in development, all of which have to be mounted on large vehicles, not in your shoulder holster. About the idea of the ol' shootin' laser, he writes, "The most noticeable obstacle is heat dissipation. Operational lasers are inefficient, converting only about 15 percent of electrical power into laser, the rest wasted in the form of extreme heat."

What we really want is the blaster, a ray gun that kicks like a mule but not as messy, showering sparks on targets, and unless military contractor Blasterizer has shown up in the last thirteen years, it doesn't look plausible anytime soon.

I wish Wilson could do an updated edition, because while some of the items covered have not yet arrived, many are getting closer -- Space Vacations, Smart House, Underwater Hotel, and Self-Steering Car, for example. No good news on the Jetpack at this time. (His chapter on the Unisex Jumpsuit leads me to another topic that I want to blog about soon.)

Wilson has two other books that make great companion titles: How to Build a Robot Army: Tips on Defending Planet Earth Against Alien Invaders, Ninjas, and Zombies, and the inevitable follow-up, How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion. He's a sprightly writer, able to lay out complex subjects with brevity, wit, and a strong grasp of the subject. I enjoyed this book -- and if you're wondering where your teleportation device, mind-reading helmet, or invisibility camouflage have gone, you will, too.