The Aerie

That Promised Future

I have never before read Tom Swift novels. I don't think I ever found them at the library. As a child I stumbled across Danny Dunn, and he fulfilled the "gosh-gee technology" niche in my reading experiences. I was particularly taken with "Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine," in which Danny schemes to build a computer to do his homework for him. When his scheme is uncovered his teacher is not upset, pointing out that by attempting to cheat, he ended up doing more work and learning more about his homework than he would have just doing the homework himself. Having since spent a decade as a compute programmer, I learned the truth of that situation.

In the years since, that promised future has and has-not come to pass. We do indeed have miniature home computers upon which we have learned to depend (in fact, I think I have one around here myself, if I can remember where it is). But we have also been disappointed: our cars do not fly, and we have learned that technology is no panacea for the world's ills.

I recently stumbled across a Tom Swift novel on my shelves (and I'm sure it's important that I don't know how it got there, but I can't think of why) and started reading it. It is NOT adult fare. The plot and characters are secondary to the completely fanciful technological devices imagined by the authors. Tom Swift is a wealthy, 18 year old genius son of a genius entrepreneur, and has a series of improbable devices, many powered by a "nuclear pile". He mostly guesses his way through the story, and all of his guesses turn out to be correct, no matter how unsupported they may have been. When his uncle's boat sinks and his uncle goes missing, Tom immediately guesses that pirates using airplanes and submarines have captured his uncle. Logic suggests that his uncle simply drowned, but Tom's unlikely guesses turn out to be true.

But however thin the plot of this empowerment fantasy, it helped paint a 1950's picture of how the world would be today. Personal aircraft, nuclear subs in every garage, and a world made shiny and inviting through the miracle of science.

The result of course is a much more mixed bag of good and bad, as with all things. And our space program has devolved from the ultimate expression of the Mechanical Age to a moribund political bureaucracy whose successes seem like notable exceptions rather than planned accomplishments.

So it warmed my heart today to read of the success of SpaceShipOne, the first privately-funded venture to the edge of space. It's a little behind schedule, but this tiny sliver of Tom Swift's future shows that space remains vulnerable to intelligence and engineering, when those skills are not shrouded beneath the wet blanket of political bureaucracy.

Pilot Michael Melville soared up to the edge of space, and there released a cloud of M&Ms in what one hopes was a spontaneous display of curiosity rather than a Mars Company product placement. On the way back to Earth, he encountered and overcame a serious threat to the success of the mission, lending drama to what otherwise might have seemed almost too easy.

Tom Swift has his own personal space plane. And Danny Dunn's candies are coated with anti-gravity shells that melt in your mouth, not in your hand. Living in the future is a more mixed bag than the press it got would have you to believe. It's nice to see some of those promises working out.

Now where the heck is that moon colony?

Posted by Albatross at June 21, 2004 9:00 PM