Where's My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived - Softcover

Daniel H. Wilson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1596911360 ISBN 13: 9781596911369

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2007

Synopsis

It's the twenty-first century and let's be honest-things are a little disappointing. Despite every World's Fair prediction, every futuristic ride at Disneyland, and the advertisements on the last page of every comic book, we are not living the future we were promised. By now, life 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. Where are the ray guns, the flying cars, and the hoverboards that we expected? What happened to our promised moon colonies? Our servant robots?
In Where's My Jetpack?, roboticist Daniel H. Wilson takes a hilarious look at the future we always imagined for ourselves. He exposes technology, spotlights existing prototypes, and reveals drawing-board plans. You will learn which technologies are already available, who made them, and where to find them. If the technology is not public, you will learn how to build, buy, or steal it. And if doesn't yet exist, you will learn what stands in the way of making it real. With thirty entries spanning everything from teleportation to self-contained skyscraper cities, and superbly illustrated by Richard Horne (101 Things to Do Before You Die), Where's My Jetpack? is an endlessly entertaining, one-of-a-kind look at the world that we always wanted.
Daniel H. Wilson, Ph.D, has a degree in Robotics from Carnegie-Mellon. He is the author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

About this title

About the Author

Daniel H. Wilson earned a Ph.D. from the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in 2005 and Masters degrees in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. Wilson is a contributing editor to Popular Mechanics magazine and author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising (Bloomsbury 2005), voted best book of 2006 by WIRED Magazine, as well as Where’s My Jetpack? (Bloomsbury 2007) and How to Build a Robot Army (Bloomsbury 2008). His forthcoming books include Bro-Jitsu: The Martial Art of Sibling Rivalry and The Robonomicon. Three of his books (Robot Uprising, Robot Army, and Bro-Jitsu) were optioned by Paramount Pictures, and he penned the screenplay based on Bro-Jitsu. Wilson hosted The Works on the History Channel, which aired Fall 2008.

Reviews

Clinically depressed fans of Star Trek and The Jetsons, take heart: the future you've been dreaming of-ray guns, robot maids, unisex jumpsuits, space vacations-is ready for production. Sort of. That's the premise of this tongue-in-cheek look at all the techno-wonders that 21st century man was promised by sci-fi dreamers of the past. In his introduction, author and robotics expert Wilson (How to Survive a Robot Uprising) sets forth a pledge: "If the technology is possible-even remotely so-this book will lay it out," gamely ignoring "any potentially catastrophic consequences." Happily, this Ph.D. isn't trading in idle speculation; among plenty of jokes and silliness he deals in solid-and fascinating-science. For instance, it turns out that teleportation can work, and in fact already has: exploiting an obscure (and complicated) rule of quantum physics, scientists achieved, under lab conditions, the teleportation of a single photon in 1993. Wilson goes on to explain (or debunk) much-anticipated wonders like robot pets, food pills and cryogenic freezing ("the chance of being reborn in the future as a brain-dead humanoid zombie surely beats having no chance at all"). Though readers of this slim guide may not be inspired to "raise your voice, and demand your personal jetpack," it's got plenty of encouragement and info for frustrated futurists.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1596911360
• ISBN 13: 9781596911369
• Binding: Paperback
• Illustrator: Richard Horne
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192