The Future Is Now

ED: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory, with the American Backstory hosts.

BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh.

PETER: I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. Brian, Peter, I have a little challenge for you.

PETER: Oh oh.

ED: I’m going to describe three scenarios, and you’re going to tell me what they have in common. OK. Here’s the first one. There are these two guys, Mike Donovan, Gregory Powell, and they’ve been tasked with investigating an abandoned mining operation. The conditions are harsh. And it so hot, in fact, these men can’t even go outside. They have to stay in the mining base. And when everything starts going to pot, they turn to the only one amongst them who can withstand the intense heat of the sun, and that’s a robot named Speedy.

PETER: I love the sound effects, Ed.

ED: Got that?

PETER: Yeah.

ED: Here’s the second one. There’s this helicopter pilot named Adam Gibson, and he lives in a place where animal cloning is practiced widely. Now human cloning is still illegal, but there’s a thriving black market in human clones anyway. This guy, Gibson, gets embroiled in the shady underworld of human cloning and discovers that he himself has been cloned, and that this second Gibson has assumed his identity. Oh god. I’m blowing your mind, aren’t I?

PETER: Yeah. You sure are.

BRIAN: Where’s the popcorn?

ED: OK. OK. You’ve got the two things. It’s too hot to go outside, so they send a robot. A guy finds that he’s been cloned. And here’s the third one. A teenager named Marty walks into the middle of town and is surprised to find enormous advertisements being projected onto the sides of buildings.

GOLDIE WILSON: Hi, friends. Goldie Wilson III for Wilson Hover Conversion Systems.

ED: Jaws 19 on the movie marquis and cars whizzing by through the air. Marty is absolutely floored by all of this, because up to a point, he’s lived in a very different world. So there are the three episodes, guys. What do they have in common?

BRIAN: Technological visions of the future.

ED: That’s a very broad common denominator. That is only partial credit. Peter, you’re clever.

PETER: Oh, I think it’s the alienation of the human from the world he had imagined in his hubris that he controlled.

ED: Oh gosh. You guys are heavy. I tell you, remind me never to hang out in a dorm room with you at 2 o’clock in the morning.

PETER: Well, I’m proud of that word, hubris.

BRIAN: I will venture a second guess. They all sound like cheesy movie plots to me.

ED: Well, two of them are cheesy movie plots, and the other was a cheesy short story plot.

PETER: Soon to be a movie.

ED: The last one I mentioned is Back to the Future II in 1989. The second one is an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie from the year 2000. And the first one is an Isaac Asimov short story from the 1940s. So that gives you a sense—1940s, 1980s, 2000.

BRIAN: Mm.

PETER: Yeah.

BRIAN: Mm.

PETER: Yeah.

BRIAN: We’re moving—

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

ED: OK, you give up? All of the scenarios that I described are set in the unimaginable year of the future of 2015. Yes, right now.

PETER: Oh no.

BRIAN: It’s not the future. That’s why we can’t imagine it, Ed. It’s now.

PETER: Well, just when you go outside watch out for the flying DeLoreans, the clones, and the robots. We’ll be in good shape.

ED: So that brings us to today’s topic for the hour, how Americans in the past have imagined the future.

BRIAN: Each week, of course, we take a topic from the current world and explore its history. And since the beginning of January is a time when so many of us lay down resolutions for the coming year. Peter?

PETER: Eh, I’m a little irresolute on that.

[LAUGHTER]

BRIAN: We thought it would be a good occasion for bringing you a short history of the future in America. We’ve got stories about life on Mars, 19th century style, and of visions of urban neighborhoods connected by Zeppelins. We’ll also consider the long history of imagining the apocalypse as set in New York City, and we’ll consider the enduring legacy of one of my favorite futuristic visions, The Jetsons.