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

It's the twenty-first century and let's be honest - things are a little disappointing. Contrary to 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 robot servants? In "Where's My Jetpack?", roboticist Daniel H Wilson takes a hilarious look at the future we always imagined for ourselves. He exposes groundbreaking 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. If it doesn't yet exist, you will learn what barriers stand in the way of making it real. With thirty entries spanning everything from underwater hotels to self-contained skyscraper cities, and superbly illustrated by Richard Horne ("101 Things to Do Before You Die"), "Where's My Jetpack?" is a fascinating, one-of-a-kind look at the world that we always dreamed of and that we're still waiting for.

Daniel H. Wilson is a roboticist at Carnegie-Mellon's Robotics Institute.