Where’s My Jetpack? A guide to the amazing science fiction future that never arrived – Daniel H. Wilson, PhD.
Allen & Unwin Bloomsbury, 2007
192 pages
RRP: AU$22.95
ISBN: 978-0-7475-8286-1

Reviewed by Cat Sparks

I have to confess that I wanted to like this book long before I actually opened it. It’s a stylish-looking publication, all jet black and silver and shimmering electric blue. Author Wilson, whose previous title How to Survive a Robot Uprising also piques my interest, takes us through a selection of familiar SF tropes: flying cars, teleportation, unisex jumpsuits, space elevators, cryogenic freezing and ray guns, etc, outlines their position in our cultural consciousness, then explains where we’re at with them all, scientifically speaking, in terms of the here and now. Wilson writes with good humour and he knows his stuff.

For example, here is the opening paragraph to the entry on SMART HOUSE:

Since the beginning of time, children have performed all the duties of a so-called smart home: grabbing beers from fridges, changing television channels, and taking verbal abuse for problems they don’t understand and probably didn’t cause. Considering that children have been around forever, it is only reasonable to expect that a better technology exists by now.

Where’s My Jetpack? should be viewed as an essential accessory to the modern dinner party, where, usually somewhere around the point of the third cork popping, certain important questions inevitably arise. Where is my flying car, for Chrissakes – the most “badass symbol of the space age?” This is the point at which you’ll be able to slouch back in your seat, adjust your spectacles and say “Actually, Dierdre, did you know that Henry Ford built a sky flivver that flew in 1928, but production was canned after a pilot died in a crash? Or that the 2005 Neiman Marcus gift catalogue offered the Moller M400 Skycar – a partially tested prototype built by a dude who’s spent the past 40 years trying to get the thing off the ground.

One quick skim of this book will enable you to rattle off countless pieces of astounding Sci Fi wackery. Did you know that microwave cooking was a by-product of military research into radar? And let’s not forget it was the Roswell aliens who gave us Teflon… OK, yeah, I added that last bit. But I know I read it somewhere, even if not in Daniel H. Wilson’s book.

Buy this book as a gift for the Sci Fi geek in your life. They won’t be disappointed.