Popular Mechanics The Wonderful Future that Never Was: Flying Cars, Mail Delivery by Parachute, and Other Predictions from the Past - Softcover

Gregory Benford

3.42

251 ratings by Goodreads

9781588169754: Popular Mechanics The Wonderful Future that Never Was: Flying Cars, Mail Delivery by Parachute, and Other Predictions from the Past

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1588169758 ISBN 13: 9781588169754

Publisher: Hearst, 2012

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Between 1903 and 1969, scientists and other experts made hundreds of predictions in Popular Mechanics about what the future would hold. Here are the very best of them, complete with the original, visually stunning retro art plus chapter introductions by astrophysics professor, science-fiction author, and former NASA advisor Gregory Benford. “Endlessly fascinating.”--Booklist. “A wonderful coffee-table book that you will also want to read page-by-page.”--Joe Haldeman, Hugo and Nebula award-winning author of The Forever War. “All these fantastically fabulous futures, and I get to live in none of them--and no, having an iPod Touch does not make up for it--but at least I have this book, which almost does.”--John Scalzi, bestselling author of Old Man's War

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About the Author:

Gregory Benford is a two-time winner of the Nebula Award and a professor of physics at the University of California. He is the author of more than 20 novels, including Jupiter Project, Artifact, Against Infinity, Eater, and Timescape. Benford has won the John W. Campbell Award, the Australian Ditmar Award, the 1995 Lord Foundation Award for achievement in the sciences, and the 1990 United Nations Medal in Literature. Popular Mechanics inspires, instructs, and influences 9 million curious minds that read the magazine every month. The magazine features breakthroughs in the latest innovations in science and technology.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Benford, an astrophysicist and noted science-fiction author, teams up with the editors of Popular Mechanics to take readers on a tour through a future that (mostly) never happened. If the various predictions seen here—all taken from the magazine’s archives—had come true, we’d be living today in cities with multiple underground levels for pedestrians and traffic (predicted in 1928); or cities made of glass (1936). We’d be living in homes with furniture you clean with a hose (1950) and wearing clothing made of aluminum (1929), or maybe asbestos (also 1929). Our cars would fly (1928, 1943), or maybe we’d be driving Rotavions, personal vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicles that can operate as an airfoil or a helicopter (1961). Despite the fact that many of the predictions discussed in the book seem laughably silly today, they’re not played for laughs; they’re presented as historical curiosities, examples of how predictions based on cutting-edge research and extrapolated from social trends can seem sensible when they’re made but not so much later on. And it’s worth noting, as the editors do, that some predictions did come true, like pocket-size computers (predicted in 1962) and mass-produced, prepackaged frozen dinners (1947). Profusely illustrated (there’s something on nearly every page), the book is endlessly fascinating, a collage of snapshots of the present the way people saw it when it was still the distant future. --David Pitt

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