The Roads Must Roll

Northridge High School was rural.  There is nothing wrong with that, but there were far more people interested in Future Farmers of America than in College Preparatory coursework.  One of the things the school did, and rightly so I believe, was to offer their English courses like college courses.  There was a requisite Freshman English, but after that, you could choose classes from Folklore or Mythology, or even English Literature.  This was fantastic!  It also allowed students of different grades to interact.  As a Freshman, I could sit next to a Senior in a Shakespeare class.  This was cool.

One of the first courses I took was Science Fiction.  The first story we read was Heinlein's The Roads Must Roll.  Although we were supposed to learn about what Heinlein called 'functionalism,' the concept that you had a place in society commensurate with your function in society.  The story centered on the maintenance workers who keep the roads rolling.  In Heinlein's future, we have done away with cars, trucks, and railroads, and replaced them with roads that move you along as a pedestrian at speeds up to 100 mph.  It was a future that hasn't happened...   yet.

Although I correctly demonstrated to my teacher - Mrs. Alberta DiLeo, whose husband edited a local science fiction newsletter that featured original works from local authors - that I got it, that is to say, I understood what she wanted me to, I also figured out something else.

You see, somewhere in the mid-1960's, Walter Cronkite had a TV show called The Twenty-First Century that told us what the future would be like.  I always liked the show, and Mrs. Dileo's class made me think about it.

The term today is Retro-Future.

Retro-Future is looking to the past, finding out what they thought the future would look like, and drawing your own conclusions.

Major Matt Mason's Lunar Station is a good example.  So is the 1939 World's Fair.

There is, to anyone who has lived more than a couple of decades, a disconnect between what we foresaw and what we experienced.  Cars were supposed to move at 'unrestricted speeds' along ribbons of highways.  Well, the Germans have that, but no one else.  Cars were supposed to be two-wheeled and gyroscopic-stabilized like the Ford Gyron.  Never happened.  We were to have colonized Mars by now.  You must be dreaming...

What we got was something else that was nothing like we imagined.  We have a device we carry that is capable of accessing the totality of human knowledge that we use to share pictures of cute kittens which we 'Like.'  It is a device beyond the imagination of Gene Rodenberry, whose Star Trek showed us a future of possibilities.  We were also supposed to have underwater cities...

Instead, we have virtual reality and computer animation that allows us to stay warm and happy and isolated from unwanted contact from other humans while we indulge in our own personal worlds.  We were also supposed to have jet-powered trains.

I love Retro-Future, probably because it is a romanticized version of what we could be, a society that is prosperous with a bright future of infinite possibilities.  But...

Like Chief Engineer Larry Gaines in Heinlein's story, we are left to ponder what it all means if we are to truly forge our future.  Otherwise, we might just be living in someone else's world...