Subtitled: “A Nineteenth-Century Vision of the Year 2000”
(Henry Holt, trade paperback, 1986, 96pp)
This is a thin little book I’ve had for nearly 40 years, since it was published. It’s ostensibly about a set of “cigarette cards” (presumably included with packs of cigarettes) designed to promote the end-of-century festivities in France in 1900. They were never distributed, but one pack survived and was brought to Asimov’s attention. So the book shows about 40 of these cards, along with Asimov’s comments about what each depicted, and how accurate or plausible those visions of the future were.
I revisited this early this month, sitting on the sofa with a cold. The illustrations are amusing, but just as notable is Asimov’s succinct introduction, describing humanity’s ideas of the end of the world, the future, and how science fiction and futurism grew from the increased rate of technological change in the 19th and 20th centuries.
I’ll paraphrase/summarize Asimov’s intro, since the basic history of science fiction in the larger culture in a nutshell. At least, it’s the one I’ve lived with, if only because of reading essays like these for nearly 60 years.
>>
Humans are mostly insecure about the future, and so they’ve tried to guess it — from the gods, the shape of an animal’s liver, whatever. Augurs. Not everyone believed in fortune-tellers. The sophisticated ones were the star-gazers, who became the astrologers. People still love fortune-telling of all kinds — cards, palm reading, tea leaves, dreams. They’re all useless, of course. The predictions we *can* make include astronomical ones. But can we know the future? Many look to the Bible. Especially about the final days of the world. God judges everyone, and send them to Heaven or Hell. Revelations. The Scandinavians had their Ragnorak. Some of the ancients thought the end would come soon. It didn’t; they tried to reinterpret their holy books. America has “millenarianism”, a group that predicted 1843 as the end of the world, and then kept revising the date when nothing happened. (Offshoots of that movement include the Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses.) But fewer believe in such predictions of the end of the world. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen, though, via nuclear war. And you hear apocalyptic speculations from some government officials like James Watt and Ronald Reagan. [In the early 1980s.]
We now have “futurism.” For that we need the conception that the future will be different from the past and the present. This wasn’t recognized until recent times. Mundane things change routinely, but not permanent changes. Things that do change, that move steadily in one direction, are progressive, by definition. Some of these changes are very slow, like the aging of the sun. Or evolutionary change. Other changes have occurred within human history, include fire, agriculture, herding, extracting minerals, inventing ships. These were one-way, progressive, changes. Technological changes have usually been slow, until this century. Now the rate of change increases steadily, and these changes are cumulative. Airplanes, radio and TV, nuclear weapons, rockets, computers. It can be argued that any progressive change involves technology – e.g. Christianity spread because of Roman roads, of harnessing the use horses, of agriculture production. The Protestant Reformation spread because of the printing press.
And so eventually changes became visible within the space of a single lifetime. The Industrial Revolution, 1769, and the steam engine. Mills, farms, locomotives. People began to wonder what the future would be like, and imagined it as different than today. And so some writers speculated about the future. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818 was the first example of modern “science fiction,” though the term wasn’t coined until 1929. Then came Poe, Hawthorne, Verne, then Wells. Verne was focused on technological advances; Wells was more fanciful, but will still a futurist. Science fiction was a major source of futurism into the middle of the twentieth century. Stories of robots and computers and nuclear bombs, which were ignored by practical people. But then an actual nuclear bomb was dropped in 1945, and suddenly science fiction was accorded a certain respect. SF writers were often bound by plot contingency, and given toward imagining far futures rather than near term changes. Serious futurists emerged after World War II, considering the short-term consequences of various technological developments.
Futurism is tricky; there are often unforeseen consequences. Like the waste from nuclear power plants. Or public antipathy. Thus it’s useful to study predictions of the past. And so, this book: a set of cigarette cards produced in 1899, depicting life in the year 2000. They were never distributed, but one set survived.
<<
Thus the core motivation for what we call science fiction is the increasingly rapid pace of change beginning in the late 19th century, and that change was tied to science and technology, and that science and technology were continually growing. So what would future consequences of those changes be?
\\
The balance of the book consists of Asimov’s commentaries on those ‘cigarette cards,’ and what they depict is a crucial topic all by itself. Here are some of the key observations:
- The people of 2000, no matter what outlandish contraption they’re riding in, are dressed just like people of 1899.
- Then-common vehicles and passtimes were extrapolated into new environments, usually implausibly. One particularly absurd example shows four people playing a game of croquet on the surface at the bottom of the sea. One has a mallet raised up like a baseball bat to make a swing! (In the water??) Also, except for enormous diving-bell style helmets, they wear only ordinary clothes.
- The artist was big on the idea of things being done under the sea, or in the air. The example on the book’s cover, shown above, shows three buoys floating in the sea to serve passengers on passing planes (which seem to have wings, or are biplanes) tobacco, wine, and liquor from a bar. Just floating out there in the ocean. (And the planes just pausing mid-air?)
- Similarly, there were visions of men flying, usually with sets of wings strapped to their backs, and often shown momentarily paused, for example to drop off a lady’s mail. Floating in the air??
- And elaborate machines, operated by levers and pulleys, were imagined to automate ordinary household tasks.
The pattern here is analogous to the frequent criticism of dumb TV and movie science fiction (what I assign the term “sci-fi” to) that shows spaceships moving like fighter jets and making noise as they rush by. Those effects are nonsense, but that’s what people, naively extrapolating their local circumstances to other realms, have wanted to see, ever since the 1950s. No doubt any competent engineer could have told the artist, who is Jean-Marc Côté by the way, how implausible his visions were. But they were intended for the general public.
I see now that Googling “jean marc cote postcards” brings up a number of pages that display more of these visions of the year 2000.
