Where's My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived
Meet roboticist Daniel H. Wilson co-author "Where's My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived," a hilarious look at the future imagined through movies, television, and comic books. He reveals which technologies are already available and those that do not yet exist - explaining what stands in the way of making them real.
It's the twenty-first century and let's be honest - things are a little disappointing. Despite every World's Fair prediction, every futuristic ride at Disneyland, and the advertisements on the last page of every comic book, we are not living the future we were promised. By now, life was supposed to be a fully automated, atomic-powered, germ-free Utopia, a place where a grown man could wear a velvet spandex unitard and not be laughed at. Where are the ray guns, the flying cars, and the hoverboards that we expected? What happened to our promised moon colonies? Our servant robots?- Books Inc.
Bio
Daniel H. Wilson
Daniel H. Wilson is an author and contributing editor to Popular Mechanics magazine. He earned a Ph.D. in Robotics from the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in 2005, where he also received Master's degrees in Robotics and Machine Learning.
He is the author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion (winner of the WIRED magazine RAVE Award for best book of 2006), as well as Where's My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived.
Wilson's work has appeared in Popular Mechanics, Wired magazine, and Discover magazine and he has been featured in the New York Times, The Washington Post, and LA Times, as well as on national radio and television programs such as Countdown with Keith Olbermann and Tech Nation with Dr. Moira Gunn.
Fiction dealing principally with the impact of actual or imagined science on society or individuals, or more generally, literary fantasy including a scientific factor as an essential orienting component. Precursors of the genre include Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726). From its beginnings in the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, it emerged as a self-conscious genre in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories, founded in 1926. It came into its own as serious fiction in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction in the late 1930s and in works by such writers as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein. A great boom in popularity followed World War II, when numerous writers' approaches included predictions of future societies on Earth, analyses of the consequences of interstellar travel, and imaginative explorations of intelligent life in other worlds. Much recent fiction has been written in the cyberpunk genre, which deals with the effects of computers and artificial intelligence on anarchic future societies. Radio, film, and television have reinforced the popularity of the genre.