We're now a society without dreams, have you noticed that?
When I got this technological nostalgia, I usually rely on a specific kind or retro sites. See my older posts Two Retro-Nostalgia Tech Sites; LOL with Modern Mechanix; The world that was not meant to be; Vintage day; Nostalgie auto...; Sci-Fi Nostalgia, Earthly Nostalgia; Site du jour: Boomer Café ; A Programmer's Life in 1965 and other Modern Nostalgia.
I also have a different kind of nostalgia (I have many, many ways of being nostalgic, including the old movies nostalgia, etc. etc.), and I'm now thinking of some architectural malaise — see for instance On Architecture and Ugliness, book for which I once made a sort of a review (in French) for a friend.
OK, en passant, here's a Wikipedia article for the Googie architecture.
Via its French translation (Où est passée ma combinaison spatiale ? Petit guide de voyage dans ce futur incroyable que nous promettait la science fiction), I've learned about the book “Where's My Jetpack? A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived”, by Daniel H. Wilson.
Nice. Check out a review by January Magazine, a NPR short speak with the author, a Q&A and a podcast in Popular Mechanics.
The nostalgic people who would like to explore related titles on Amazon.com should beware of and keep away from “Follies of Science: 20th Century Visions of Our Fantastic Future”, for it has very convincing dreadful reviews.
OTOH, from my wishlist I guess it would be safe to consider any of the following: Exit to Tomorrow: History of the Future, World's Fair Architecture, Design, Fashion 1933-2005 — The New York World's Fair, 1939/1940: in 155 Photographs by Richard Wurts and Others — The End of the Innocence: The 1964-1965 New York World's Fair — New York World's Fair, The 1964-1965 (NY) (Images of America).
Oh, the World's Fairs... I have plenty of documentation on the 1958 one, in Brussels... with the Atomium.
Do you know what we have lost with the 1990s? The hope. All the Sci-Fi was comforting, reinvigorating, and it was filling us with hopes in a better future. Now that we're stuffed with plenty of technology gizmos nobody dreamt of, we also realize that whatever the Sci-Fi novels, stories or movies were telling us from the '50s to the '80s was BS.
As a side effect, the World's Fair are nowhere close to what they used to be...
1889: l'Éxposition Universelle (and the Eiffel Tower), Paris
1933/34: Chicago (in the middle of the depression!)
1937: l'Éxposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, Paris (Guernica!)
1939/40: NYC
1958: Expo '58 (the Atomium!), Bruxelles
1964/65: NYC
1967: Expo '67, Montreal
Everything after that was less successful.
We're now a society without dreams (other than erotic dreams), a society without a soul...
We're the living dead. We're living on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. etc. Or in SecondLife, what the heck?
6 comments"We're now a society without dreams (other than erotic dreams), a society without a soul..." - I don't think we're there, yet. It'd be darn interesting to see what Eliade had said about this. Sci-fi ideas still moves us, at least moves me. But as the human world goes on I tend to change perspectives over it; like for example Proyas' "I, Robot" didn't have a happy ending at all if you ask me. Fantasy and sci-fi are the main things I've been consuming the last years, prolly because I needed an escape from the daily shit.
When it didn't have a happy ending, it helped you value the present! :-)
Nowadays, the present sucks, and the future is no more what it used to be... (ditto before).
There's no such thing as "happy ending" in the real world. This is an invention similar heaven after death, to make people change the palpable shit in the present for a vague and unguaranteed possibility in the future.
For me, sci-fi (and others, not only fantasy, but also art) was not a way to deal with the present or ignore it; on the contrary, it enabled me to set scopes for myself far beyond the present possibilities.
Tell me, otherwise, how would I have survived with my judgement unspoiled, if all my childhood and young age happened under Ceausescu?
Unfortunately, I grew up, and yet not old :), only to see that present dreams are far more trivial, even in the young generation. This decline of the ideals we see around us made the present low end and non-differential consumerism possible. This made home appliances, techno gimmicks and trips abroad a scope in itself, and not a mean to enable people to progress.
Didn't you notice that beside the nanotechnology and it's application, there's no progress in the world? Not even technological, and I won't dare to mention others. It's Monday morning, for anybody's sake, I don't want my whole week spoiled...
Perhaps the Great Inventions of Sci-Fi are locked by the greedy capitalists? :) :(
BTW Fluieratorul is right - we still live in XIX century. Nanotech is BS as far as I am concerned. I do not want the tiny Aluminum bits to be added to sugar to prevent it from lumping (I liked to suck them! :) )
Béranger, some say we live in anticivilization. The shiny hopes you wrote was one side of the same coin. (I still love to read Andromeda (Nebula) by Ivan Yefremov in my 50s. *)
The other side was filmed in such movies as "Judge Dredd" and "Demolition Man". We chose the other path.
*) I have gotten Englih version from Progress Publishers (I bought it in Commy times.). I found Russian text in Internet and the English translation is excellent, if not far more better than original book!
Regards, P2O2
Ah, Efremov! http://iae.newmail.ru/translations/Andromeda.zip
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Sci-fi doesn't have to be "hopeful" or shit like that. It's just how someone imagines the future. And the future can be bleak, dark, high-tech, whatever. Sometimes there's no "future", as the sci-fi work cannot be positioned in time and/or space.
What's most appealing at sci-fi are the fundamental questions it raises. Not the characters' conflicts, ideas, hopes, charitable deeds etc. That's just fuel to keep you going to the end, where the author will make you wonder about abstract concept X.