Your Flying Car Awaits

Yesterday was one of those frustrating sort of days where you wish a "skip" button was available. First off, I'd wrenched my back a couple of days before–not in one of those heroic episodes of trying to juggle boulders or practicing the hammer throw, but in one of those annoying ones that involve turning in just the wrong way while picking up a bag of groceries. With one innocent turn of the waist I have been left with a sacroiliac that is a concentrated zone of agony. That's if I just sit still, of course. If I stand up (or rather try to stand up), I'm trapped at a 45° angle while my left leg has all the structural integrity of overcooked rotini. It takes a lot of teeth-gritting and the sort of keep-your-mind-off-it attitude normally associated with holding one's hand over a lit candle while jabbing a taser in the thigh, but I can manage to get more or less upright. I can even walk and if I do it long enough both the limp and the pain more or less disappear. Unfortunately, if I stop walking or sit down, it hurts just as much as the reverse. And did I mention that the whole thing has a knock-on effect that makes it impossible to cough properly, aggravates my ulcer, and leaves me desperately in need of a cup of tea, yet in no condition to enjoy it? If not, I just did.

Of course, the other part of my day was that it rained in that way that it does only in Britain and the Pacific Northwest; that cold, endless downpour that is neither a shower nor a storm, but possesses that relentless quality that leaves the air itself damp, sucks up any source of warmth like a sponge, and after two hours convinces everyone that it has always rained like this and any memory to the contrary is merely a fever dream.

This also meant that it was far too wet for the roofers to work. Whether this was out of consideration for not turning our bedrooms into swimming pools or their understandable desire not to skid screaming off of a slick Cape Cod roof is a question for another time, but it did leave me with the worst of situations. It's bad enough to lose a day's work because I'm fleeing the hammers and scaffolding crowd, but it's even worse when said crowd doesn't show and a whole day of work opens up and I haven't any real plans to take advantage of it.

It does, however put me in the perfect mood for reviewing books.

The item in question, Your Flying Car Awaits: Robot Butlers, Lunar Vacations, and Other Dead-Wrong Predictions of the Twentieth Century by Paul Mil0 (HarperCollins 2009), at first seems right up my atomic-powered alley. It is, after all, about Future Past. However, a book doesn't inspire much confidence when it's contradicted by its own title, since Your Flying Car Awaits deals with predictions that weren't "dead wrong" as well as those that were.

Unlike most recent works on Future Past, this one avoids the usual assemblage of magazine covers and images in favour of solid prose. As the title suggests, Mr Milo deals with predictions about the 21st century, but his list is a very vague one (Prediction: Cloning. Answer: Did that in the 19th century. Next.) and the treatment is equally vague and haphazard with each topic given little more than a cursory treatment. Mr Milo covers a wide variety of topics from flying cars to mind control, but his treatment is very shallow and perfunctory to the point where he blithely mixes decades of entirely separate developments. For example, in dealing with the Picturephone, Mr Milo manages to leap fifty years from Metropolis to Dick Tracy to Space: 1999 in a single sentence with what can only be described as acrobatics. Worse, he consistently does so without citing any sort of sources. I don't mean neat scholarly footnotes filling up half the page. I mean Mr Milo doesn't bother with perfunctory references or even a bibliography, so it's impossible to follow up anything that might be of real interest and one is often left with no more citation of a fact than attributing it to "a French engineer". It's an approach that a web page can get away with, but the whole point of a book in the Internet age is to give the reader scope and sustained insight, not the experience of involuntary surfing.

This was intended as a popular work and Mr Milo tries for a light touch. However, the book is really too serious in its approach to be humourous and too humourous to be serious. In fact, much of the humour is heavy handed and a bit condescending. Mr Milo would have been better served by another rewrite and editing out the humour entirely in favour of dealing with his topics in more depth and greater rigour.

The most glaring problem with Your Flying Car Awaits is ironic. Mr Milo has a very poor grasp of history (he cites Howard Zinn as a reliable authority!) and technology, and even poorer empathy, which is vital in understanding a subject like Future Past. He often acts as though the present is a target and that those in the past should be judged on how close their "predictions" come to the mark, though even a second's reflection would reveal that this is an unfair and unrealistic criteria. It's downright absurd when applied to political predictions since, by their very nature such prognostications will have an accuracy of precisely nil. The irony is that while Mr Milo writes about a succession of men and women who were blinded by the prejudices of their time, he is blind to his own. He's very much a mainstream American liberal of the more unreflective variety who regards it as reasonable to always use the word "housewife" with scare quotes for no readily apparent reason and has such a complacent set of leftist beliefs that he regards the simplistic socialism of Edward Bellamy's 1888 satire Looking Backwards as a reasonable goal without a moment's thought that it is only reasonable if you buy into Mr Bellamy's utopia, but an utter nightmare if you don't. It also doesn't help when Mr Milo happily espouses the possibility of outlawing war (I'd have thought that sort of pacifism died at Munich) and a one-world government when the outcome of the previous exponents of those very ideas in Mr Milo's own book might suggest to him that he's merely drawing a target on his own back. And in case anyone thinks that it is Mr Milo's politics that forms my objection to his book, I would point out that the pacificism/one-world stuff comes toward the end of the work, by which time I was having trouble even paying attention.

All in all, a very frustrating and superficial work that is rather like seeing a vast array of glasses at a wine tasting and discovering that they all contain coloured water.