Fictions of the Future: Dreaming science

I’ve just begun flipping through the pages of Megan Prelinger’s gorgeous book, Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957-1962, and I’m already hooked. The huge book traces the history of the post-war technological boom, a time when space represented both a spirit of endless possibility and the sprawling potential of human knowledge. It’s quite different from other books on the space race. Prelinger fastidiously researched the scientific imaginaire of the era as illustrated in the graphic art and texts of popular culture: pulp comics, advertisements, novels, movie posters, photos and corporate propaganda. What Prelinger reveals is a dreamy fiction constructed and realized not just by scientists and scholars but people from all walks of the earth.

The book couldn’t be more timely. Whereas the space race saw us expanding our fictions of the future outwards to the limitless void of space, today’s digital revolution inverses the gaze into the infinite practices and motors of the internal life — the smallest minutia of our daily life. We use hand-held computers on the train to watch DIY movies on Youtube; we speak great distances on cyborg-like phones planted into our ears like extended body parts; we surf sprawling digital magazines just like this one and scroll through the ever-expanding information cloud on Google, Twitter, Pandora, and all the rest of the binary space lands on the Web. We’re producing new visions and realizing new dreams of the future, today.