sf, page 28 of 33

“Now read on… into the fantastic world of the future!” That’s how each of the three sections of The Usborne Book of the Future (on Robots, Future Cities, and Space Travel) begins, after a brief look at these subjects (tool-use, cities, and transport) in history. It was published in 1979. I don’t think I owned it, but must have got it out of the local library — certainly, I pored over it enough for some of its images and ideas to really stick in my mind. I mentioned the key one in a previous Mewsings a while back (writing about William Gibson, whose latest novel I am, by coincidence, reading at the moment), which showed two possible views of how the future might be, one good, one bad. It was titled “Two Trips to the 21st Century”, and I remember really worrying that I might end up living in the nasty, polluted, breathing-apparatus one. I recently gave in to a bout of curiosity/nostalgia and bought it, perhaps mainly so I could have a second look at that image. Here it is (click on it for the full double-page spread, including key to the numbers):

“Two Trips to the 21st Century” from The Usborne Book of the Future (1979)

And then, of course it struck me — here I am, living in the 21st century!

Usually, nothing dates as fast as people’s ideas about how their future is going to be, but having a browse through the Usborne Book from the privileged standpoint of living in the era it was talking about, I was pleased to see how well it stands up. This may be partly thanks to the fact that it wasn’t just based on someone’s speculations having read a few topical SF novels, or on what would look the most visually interesting to Star Wars-hungry kids, but because it was based on the research and speculation of scientists and groups like Bell Aerospace, Boeing, and NASA, which get mentioned in the acknowledgements (alongside Arthur C Clarke and Omni magazine). In fact, the most dated thing about it is, perhaps, a single reference to “housewives” — which also led to my noticing how few women are taking an active part in the jumpsuited future the book depicts.

But generally, the thing that works in The Usborne Book of the Future is that it isn’t talking down to its young audience. It’s not setting out to paint a picture of the sort of future the kids of the day would have wanted, but it really looks at how technical advances might affect day-to-day life, and how the problems of an ever more energy-hungry civilisation might be overcome (gathering solar energy in space and sending it down to Earth in a concentrated microwave beam, for instance — is this still a possibility?). There are far more bicycles (even if occasionally solar-powered) than jetpacks in the book, and the one technological advance that most excited me at the time, I now realise is decades old:

The “risto”, or wristwatch radio-telephone.

Here is how the living room of the 1970s future was going to look:

The living room of a house of the future, from The Usborne Book of the Future (1979)

And, apart from the fashions (futuroid, for the man watching TV, retrograde for the footballer he’s watching), and the drinks-serving robot, it’s all come true. We have video cameras, we have home shopping, we have films on video discs, we have electronic mail, we even have video phones and — gods! — we have flat-screen TVs. I think we all deserve a pat on the back for now, officially, living in the future.

The one thing I wonder, looking at this picture, is why man number 2 is so keenly filming his neighbours. The politics of the future is not discussed in The Usborne Book, and this may prove to have been its one major blind spot. Most of its more optimistic ideas (and it generally takes the optimistic view, though doesn’t ignore the problems) have perhaps not come about because there just isn’t the level of political unity required to change the way we live.

Also, of course, there’s the annoying problem of the way the past doesn’t disappear the moment we hit the future — so much of it is left lying around, clogging up the pathways to futurological advancement. The real reason we don’t have superfast cool-looking monorails is because it’s far more cost-effective to adapt our existing dual rail systems to new advances (if we even bother to do that), and the same goes for all technological advances. They have to be bolted onto the present, upgraded step-by-step. But cost, and the sheer tonnage of existing hardware, are two things it’s easy to ignore when you’re reclining in your semi-spheroid easy chair in your sparkly new jumpsuit, speculating on what the future will bring.

Still, I’m so glad it wasn’t that “polluted city of a dying world”. Not yet, anyway.

(Some credits: The Usborne Book of the Future was written by Kenneth Gatland and David Jefferis, and the artwork was by Gordon Davies, Terry Hadler, Brian Lewis, Michael Roffe and George Thompson.)

“So you’re my replacements! A dandy and a clown! Have you done anything?”

“Uh, well we’ve assessed the situation—”

“Just as I thought! Nothing.”

Hawkwind’s 1999 album In Your Area is a bit of a hodgepodge, being half live, half studio, and with most of the original material consisting of instrumentals rather than original songs. As a result it never really creates that unique identity, that particular atmosphere an album needs to bring you back to it again and again. But after buying it I had it on pretty much constant play for a couple of weeks, largely because of a 44-second track halfway through, called “The Nazca”. A typical Hawkwind weirdie, it consists of the usual electronic synth wooshiness and what I thought, at first, must be a sample from some classic sci-fi film:

“Intelligent life is so very rare. The rarest thing in creation, but the most precious. It is the only thing that gives meaning to the universe. Without it, nothing begins, nothing ends…”

Something about that quote grabbed me. It seemed cosmic, tragic, and hopeful all at once. I really wanted to know where it came from, but for once a Google search turned up absolutely no results, and despite having seen a good many classic SF films (and having read about a good few more) I couldn’t imagine which one it might come from. (The title was no help. It refers to the Nazca lines in Peru — those large-scale ground-doodles made, about one and a half thousand years ago, for the amusement of the gods, or any other sky-flying entity that happens to be passing.)

Things got even more intriguing when the same voice (and therefore, I assumed, an extract from the same quote) appeared in a few more Hawkwind tracks, speaking some different lines. One version of Tim Blake’s solo piece, “Lighthouse”, for instance, has:

“We are a very old people, from a very old planet compared to yours. If we are to survive we must colonise…”

Finally, a couple of months ago, I got the answer. The quote wasn’t from an old SF film, it’s from John Wyndham’s 1968 novel Chocky.

Assuming it was from the 1984 TV adaptation (which I missed at the time it was first shown, probably because it was on ITV, and I tended to watch BBC), I put it on my LoveFILM rental list. But that turned out only to feature a very shortened version of the “Intelligent Life” speech, and in a totally different voice. (It had good theme music, though. A little reminiscent of Brian Eno’s “Sparrowfall (2)” from Music For Films (1978), but excusably so, because I suspect the melody was designed to echo the word “Chocky”, and it’s the melody that makes it sound similar to the Eno track.) There’s also a 1967 BBC radio adaptation (which can be found at Archive.org), but there the “Intelligent Life” speech is equally short.

I’m going to keep searching, but I suspect it must have been recorded by Mr Brock and co. themselves. Either way, here’s some more of the quote from the novel (all the dot-dot-dots are present in the original):

“But intelligent life is rare… very rare indeed… the rarest thing in creation…

“But the most precious…

“For intelligent life is the only thing that gives meaning to the universe. It is a holy thing, to be fostered and treasured.

“Without it nothing begins, nothings ends, there can be nothing through all eternity but the mindless babbling of chaos…

“Therefore, the nurture of all intelligent forms is a sacred duty. Even the merest spark of reason must be fanned in the hope of a flame.”

Which I absolutely agree with.

It’s a nice little novel, mildly satirical of the comfortable middle-classes it is also so obviously addressed to. Although ostensibly about a little boy who is contacted telepathically by a far advanced alien being, Chocky could equally be taken as a tale about the emergence of a creative talent, and about the way the conventionalities, and even the kindnesses, of a civilised society do their best to stifle, embarrass, disapprove of, and generally shut it up.