"Sometimes it feels as if progress itself has actually slowed down, with the 1960s as the climax of a 20th century surge of innovation, and the decades that followed consisting of a weird mix of consolidation, stagnation and rollback. Certainly change in the first half of the 20th century seemed to manifest itself in the most dramatic and hubristic manner. It was an era of massive feats of centralized planning and public investment: huge dams; five-year plans of accelerated industrialization; gigantic state-administered projects of rural electrification, freeway construction and poverty banishment. Science fiction writers who grew up with this kind of thing (including the darker side of 'public works' -- the mobilization of entire populations and economies for war, the Soviet collectivization of peasant farms that resulted in massive famine, genocide) naturally imagined that change would continue to unfold in this dynamic and grandiose fashion. So they foresaw things like the emergence of cities enclosed inside giant skyscrapers and grain harvested by combines the size of small ships voyaging across vast prairies."
Simon Reynolds in Salon reviews Daniel H. Wilson's Where's My Jetpack? A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived.
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I got quite a sense of deja vu reading this post. It can't be over a week ago that I posted Eisenhower's Farewell Speech to the nation on my blog.
I had not been at all pleased with the 1950's. I had been quite critical of Ike for having Nixon on his ticket, and the purge was appalling but after these words of his final address, I could no longer resist an unreserved admiration for him.
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