Flying Cars and Food Pills - My Website

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Flying Cars and Food Pills

The Visionaries, Madmen, and Tinkerers Who Created the Future That Never Was
A Celebration 1893-1962

Got your attention?

I’m finally ready to announce my long-term labor of love, Flying Cars and Food Pills. (With the mods’ permission, of course.) As the subtitle indicates, it’s the story of what sf historian James Gunn has called the Consensus Future, the Future that Golden Age SF writers bought into, the Future that was gathered and satirized in The Jetsons, the cool Future of silly, shiny toys that people think was promised to them. Flying Cars. Food Pills. Rays. Robots. Rockets.

Nobody’s ever done a proper History of the Future. (I’ve looked: there are books with that title and similar ones and I have them all.) It couldn’t be done before the Internet gave access to the thousands of originals in every form of media. I hope to publish that book. Want a taste of it? I’ve put up a chapter as an ebook available on Amazon, Flying Cars: The Miracle of Flight - In Your Driveway!

I realized there’s too much stuff for any one book, stuff that is way too good to set aside. (1930s rocket mail is my favorite. No, I never knew about it either.) So a book and a website, complements of each other. I’ll be adding pages to the website regularly but there already are tens of thousands of words on it accompanied by hundreds of images, each one sourced with title and date (context is everything).

And in the most shameless pandering I can muster, there’s a page just for you guys: 1920’s Style Death Rays.

I’m hoping that Flying Cars and Food Pills will hit every nerd nerve in your bodies. Since you’ll be among the very first to see it, I’m desperately looking for feedback on everything. If you want to send it in private, there’s a Contact page under the About tab.

A splendid time is guaranteed for all.

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Congratulations on an excellent website. It looks like a lot of fun and I have bookmarked it. There was a website called Modern Mechanix I was a big fan of, but it does not look like it is updating anymore. Your website looks better. Some of the old predictions were impressive, and some were just to sell magazines. It is crazy how human safety was almost never a consideration. Good luck Exapno Mapcase.

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I’ve been through the site – a lot of excellent work, and great images.

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Boy, howdy! Bookmarked.

My browser is set up in curmudgeonly way where I have no script running on firefox, so it looked like a page of blocked links when I first went to it. It took me saying allow all twice to get it working, but then it handled just fine.

I haven’t been through it all yet. It looks like good old Hugo Gernsback kind of fun.

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I used Wix to set up the site, which means it comes with scripts to do slideshows and other nifty stuff. Worth it for the show of slides of rocket mail stamps alone.

The Modern Mechanix blog is an invaluable resource. It’s a place to start from, though, not an end in itself for me. Most of the issues are also available through Google Books and going to the complete original gives better context. This is a social history, so what got presented to the public is more important than the inventions themselves. Something that made a cover would have made far more impression than a tiny image buried deep inside. The media made this future more than inventors did.

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Cool! Along with Cat Bowling I have a feeling I’ll pass way too many hours there as you build it up.

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Hmmph! Not a single word about The Man from Glad? (Yes, as in Saran Wrap).

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Sorry, but I have to give a serious answer. I stop my history in 1962 because The Jetsons killed that Future. Après Jetsons, le déluge. It becomes camp, and that commercial is a perfect example.

The actual line is fuzzier than that, just as in my arbitrary starting point of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. The end is much sharper than the beginning nonetheless. By mid-60s camp futures are everywhere. Camp was acknowledged at the time in the splashiest terms by Susan Sontag in 1964’s “Notes on Camp,” which specifically lists “the old Flash Gordon comics” as part of the canon of Camp.

Hardly anybody today remembers, but from 1960-1962, the science fiction genre was considered to be dead and writers were fleeing it for other genres they could make a living in. Darkest before the dawn syndrome. 1962 was the year Cele Goldsmith started publishing the writers who would save the field - Zelazny, Disch, LeGuin - by throwing out the Consensus Future and writing literature about people.

We now look back at the whole century’s worth of Future and lump it all under camp. It wasn’t. Not until after 1962. That’s big and meaningful.

Sorry. Back to cool stuff. Cat Bowling. Any relation to Kat Denning?

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I hadn’t realized about the severe dip in science fiction at that time until I picked up a copy of Earl Kemp’s Who Killed Science Fiction? some time ago. I was a wee tyke in 1960 and was unaware of this, growing up on paperback SF mainly, with a few magazines (F&SF, Analog) on the side. That there was a hiatus came as a surprise to me., and at first I didn’t understand why Kemp’s book was even published.

The all-important background is:

So that’s why SF was considered dead. What caused the demise of American News Company, I don’t know. But apparently neither does anyone else:

It’s interesting that the health of a genre can be so completely stifled by the fall of one company (albeit an incredibly important one in its field), and not due to any failing of the genre itself.

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Another good source for writers’ attitudes of that time is The Best of Xero, a complication from Pat & Dick Lupoff’s Hugo Award winning fanzine.

Not only is it a lot of fun, but it’s a wonderful illustration about how science fiction writers can’t see the future any better than anyone else. They’re all moaning and complaining about the field. None of them think original paperbacks will ever be worth anything. None of them see the field changing, or for that matter the entire culture beginning to slip away. They all see the world of the early 60s as the continuation of the 50s that it was and the abrupt end of that era is literally unimaginable.

You only see the expected. The Consensus Future was about the expected future. Bits of it came true, large lumps did not. Our hindsight wants us to think it was all expectable. That’s completely wrong. It’s really, really tough to see the Future as people in the past saw it, but I’ve put a few thousand hours into it and I’m beginning to get the hang of it.

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I’m a little late in finding out, but turns out my site got a big shout out in The December 13 Feedback column of New Scientist.

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Wicked good fun, congratulations. I bookmarked it for those middle of the night web surfing adventures. I grew up in the '50’s and '60’s and read Popular Mechanics, Popular Science and all that stuff. Seriously believed the future was limitless. Sheesh.

mind the gap

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Hi, all you futureheads out there in orbit digging the beam from the ol’ home planet. Here’s an update through time and space.

I just published WHAT WAS IT? The Mystery Airship of 1896 (History of the Future Book 2).

(Book 1 was Flying Cars: The Miracle of Flight - In Your Driveway! (History of the Future Book 1), now retroactively retitled in Amazon’s quirky Kindle way of tying related books together. May I rant to you about the 1-star rating, which complains that a Kindle book listed at 33 pages long and costing $0.99 isn’t a full-length book? Should I have personally emailed him/her/it to say read the damn page before you click? And she/he/it (shithead, for short) liked my website! :dubious::(:smack::mad::confused::eek:)

Anyway, the new article covers what today we would call a UFO sighting over Sacramento in 1896. Back then, though, they thought that the Age of Flight had finally arrived. It set off a media frenzy exactly comparable to our 24/7 cable news coverage as more headlines meant more sightings and more sightings meant more headlines before finally trailing off into nothingness. I cover the coverage, looking for the first time at the previous and regular articles that told readers that flight was imminent and the day-by-day newspaper hysteria of wild stories, claims of credit, attempted hoaxes, debunking, and outright attacks. With lots of illustrations at what they thought they saw. It could happen tomorrow and exactly the same story arc would follow, just with more on-camera interviews.

All the links in my OP are still good, so I won’t repeat them (read the damn page). My website, Flying Cars and Food Pills (that’s a link: why take chances?), has several more articles then you would have seen in November. Cal, I found a ray gun (sorta) in the last place you would ever think to look: a Donald Duck western.

I need to add my other website that you might be interested in. The Gnome Press Release has gotten a lot bigger and better, although I’ll be working on it all year. It’s a new bibliography with history of the seminal small F&SF publisher Gnome Press. From 1948-1962, Gnome was the first or an early publisher of books by Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Williamson, Pohl, Leiber, Kuttner, C. L. Moore, Robert E. Howard, L. Ron Hubbard, Andre Norton, and a double dozen more. Talking about Gnome is talking about F&SF growing up from pulp magazines to hardbacks. The pages can be read in any order. For everyone who cares about bibliographic details (I believe there are three of us left alive) I correct errors in previous accounts and try to straighten out some of the mysteries of why the hell any sentient publisher would do the things Gnome did. Some. The rest is a black hole.

Serious fun.

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While I’m spreading myself thin, I’ve also started a Facebook page called, what else, Flying Cars and Food Pills.

There are two albums. The Past Future contains photos of flying cars, robots, and all that good old-time futurism. Silent F&SF Films is an attempt to capture all the surviving films that have made it onto Youtube. I’m using A Reference Guide to American Science Fiction Films, volume 1, by A. W. Strickland and Forrest J. Ackerman as a source, going through it chronologically. There are some problems with it - for unfathomable reasons they list nothing by Melies, who’s practically a whole album by himself and they get things wrong since it was harder to research things in 1981. But it’s a start and I can fill in the holes from other sources. I can’t find anybody else who has done this, though if you know of any - stop me now!

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Cool! I don’t know how I missed this the first time.

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Very nice!

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No, spread yourself sideways, up and down,
Interesting.

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Time for an update and announcement about my new book.

Max Valier: Rocket Man (History of the Future Book 3)

Who is Max Valier, you ask?

Other short ebooks in the series are WHAT WAS IT? The Mystery Airship of 1896 (History of the Future Book 2) and Flying Cars: The Miracle of Flight - In Your Driveway! (History of the Future Book 1).

I’ve reformatted my website, Flying Cars and Food Pills and added several more new pages since April. One of them is the most complete history of the Galaxy Novels series, put out as Horace Gold as a companion to Galaxy Science Fiction magazine in the 1950s. That’s led to my writing a number of articles on paperback history that will be appearing next year in The Digest Enthusiast and Paperback Parade.

I’ve also been busy adding info about more Gnome Press titles in my other website, The Gnome Press Release. Along those lines, I have the lead article in the November issue of the New York Review of Science Fiction, The Women of Gnome Press, which takes a look at how women were treated in sf publishing back in the so-called Golden Age.

As always, comments would be very welcome, either here or through the websites.

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I’ve had some problems reported with formatting on the multitude of platforms that Kindle books are displayed upon. Text without pictures, pictures without text, even the bizarrest of possible variations: italicized words show up blank. Sometimes only certain fonts have issues while others display perfectly. You’ll be seeing the old versions, I understand, but I need to know whether problems exist I wasn’t aware of. Anyone who now buys a book will see the updated and presumably correct version, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that none are there.

Max Valier: Rocket Man (History of the Future Book 3)

WHAT WAS IT? The Mystery Airship of 1896 (History of the Future Book 2)

Flying Cars: The Miracle of Flight - In Your Driveway! (History of the Future Book 1)

Everything works now in Kindle’s online Previewer and its offline Previewer (two very different beasts), so I’m hoping the fixes propagate everywhere. If anyone who has purchased one of the three Kindle short books could check and let me know if it’s fully displaying, what the platform is, and what fonts were tested I’d be very appreciative.

Not much else new to talk about since I’ve mostly been working on articles for the magazines mentioned in my previous post. I have put up two pages, though.

Outpost Mars, a novel by “Cyril Judd” (C. M. Kornbluth and Judith Merril) is possibly the first adult look at seriously creating a Martian colony. Published in 1951, it’s an outstanding example of f&sf’s positives and negatives at the time.

You can’t look at the past Future without dealing with Modernism, and I found a fantastic example in Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet, a Bauhaus fling with set and costume design married to modern dance.

More to come.

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A big announcement. I’ve always intended that my website was intended to spawn books. I’ve just signed a contract with the popular culture academic publisher McFarland to write a book tentative titled From Automata to R2D2: The Robot in Popular Culture. It will be the first book on the entire history of robots, to my amazement. I’ve be covering all of popular media, from pulps and newspapers to comic books and strips, movies and television, classic SF, robot toys, popular science magazines, and anything else I can find. Take a look at the Robot tab on the site for samples of what you’ll see, though of course everything will be written over from scratch for the book.

Signing the contract is the first in a very long series of steps, obviously. I’ll be spending all next year writing with the delivery date in early 2018. Therefore the book won’t appear until late 2018 or even 2019 depending on McFarland’s publishing schedule. It’ll probably wind up having a different title, but I’ll let you know of any changes.

I’m hoping I’ll still find time to add to my website. Not on robots, though. I’ve got to save every scrap for the book. Next thing you’ll see is a report on the famous yet almost unread The Case of the Little Green Men, a classic by Mack Reynolds, set at a 1951 sf convention. Yet it’s a straight mystery, not sf. I’m pairing it with a 1951 Life magazine article on fandom. Oh, the innocence!