Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future (Paperback)

Stemming from a traveling exhibit sponsored in Michigan by the Michigan Humanities Council, its retro-future images (comprised of period memorabilia, car designs, advertisements, and architectural wonders) are bountiful, crisply reproduced and accompanied by text that adds context to the visual journey.

And what a journey! Travel back to an anticipated future when modernism and futurism were part of the manifest destiny of humankind.

Employing an added bit of retrospective frisson, in the post 9/11 world, this mid-80s work now serves as a window on a future that would never be realized, of a time when people still dreamed of building towers to the sky. Thankfully, its unabashed message of near-limitless possibilities is conveyed utterly without irony.

This volume can be enjoyed on so many levels. Delight in the visual salience of images gathered from dozens of rare sources. Lavish your attention on the many literary influences and how these images would inspire a whole genre of science fiction and futurist works, from Buckminster Fuller to Gene Roddenberry to Alvin Toffler.

In this "shape of things to come," the future, our present, is always a golden destiny of exotic creative and technological evocations and innovations - even when the future is more dystopian than utopian.

It is a reminder that hope and vision, art and science, are intrinsic to the human condition and surely the salvation for our own, as yet unwritten, future.

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The real strength of the book is it's vast number of both color and black and white illustrations. You have everything from ink engravings from 19th century illustrated newspapers and penny dreadfuls, to the glorious 4 color covers of 1930's pulp magazines, to film stills of the "modern era" (Star Wars, Blade Runner, and Road Warrior.)

I found the ideas in the insightful text most interesting. It is pointed out that the popular image of the past changes and evolves through time. The Victorians and Edwardians seem to assumed that the future would be much like their heirarchical and elite present, just with bigger buildings and more complex machines. The first half of the 20th century was driven largely by an utopian, often socialist, vision of a better future for all. However, the vision that seems to dominate the later half of the century is a grim, corporate, cyberpunk nightmare.

As Arthur C. Clark points out in the text, the future isn't what it used to be.

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