Sweet Cucumber

A trip in time to the year 2000 and beyond. See the robots, machines and cities of the future, and then travel to the stars.

First published in 1979 by Usborne Books, The Usborne Book of the Future was written by Kenneth Gatland and David Jefferis.

It has been scanned completely and is now made available through The Pointless Museum (a collection of worthless and forgotten things).

A must see for the aficionados of old skool futurism !

But even if you don’t care about these things, there’s two pages in there which are worth reading nonetheless: Two Trips to the 21st Century. Page one, and page two.

Here’s a quote from those pages:

Polluted city of a dying world.

If drastic steps are not taken to control pollution and to try to achieve some sort of ecological balance in the world, the picture on the left is likely to be typical of a city of the early 21st century. Its unpleasant features include:
1. Line of stunted, dying trees […]
2. Smog-laden sky […]
3. Heavy trucks thunder along the pitted roadway while cars battle their way through the traffic fumes. […]
4. Huge, ugly, apartment blocks are thrown up to keep pace with […]
5. Neglect and decay result in city systems […] breaking down.

Sounds familiar, anyone ?

And another favorite of mine, in the section The Electronic Household :

Mail slot. By 1990, most mail will be sent in electronic form. Posting a letter will consist of placing it in front of a copier in your home or at the post office. The electronic read-out will be flashed up to a satellite, to be beamed to its destination.

Darn, who would have known ?

But with all this future-retro stuff from the 60ties and 70ties (the decades I was raised in), two things strikes me the most: 1) the future - now - is a LOT bleaker than what ever has been predicted, and 2) they lied to us. We were promised atomic cars, space travel and a totally careless life where everyone was happy, or a close thereabouts. No unemployment, no famine, no friggin’ global warming. Instead, what we have now is butt-ugly cars (on petrol!), one fake trip to the moon, and a life so expensive one needs to be a billionaire to go shopping for basic foods.