Time for a pulp countdown now, so here's my top 10 future inventions we were promised by Popular Mechanics magazine that we're still waiting for! #SaturdayMotivation
At #10: motorised unicycles! This was a very popular Edwardian idea inspired by the penny farthing bicycle. Although a few prototypes were made we never really fell in love with driving one big wheel. Also: not great in the rain...
At #9: personal radar. Now this is actually a pretty neat idea and a number of cars now use radar or lidar as an anti- aid. We're still waiting for it to be built into a hat however.
At #8: the ion drive. Some space probes do use this as an efficient incremental mode of propulsion. Getting it to power flight on Earth is a bit trickier.
At #7: wearable gyrocopters. More powerful than jetpacks the concept certainly works, but it's still a solution in search of a problem. Oh, and deafeningly loud!
At #6: airships for everyon. The airship is the quintessential pulp mode of transport and modern blimps are pretty safe. But we still don't like to travel by gasbag, no matter how sustainable it may actually be.
At #5: air tugs. Having one aircraft transport another one can make sense: it's one way to crack the problem of single stage to orbit flight. Virgin Galactic are the only current takers though.
At #4: rocket-assisted vehicles. It's a neat way to manoeuvre a truck on tricky terrain, or to break a speeding car quickly, but putting rockets on cars is probably going to cause more problems than it solves.
At #3: recreational helicopters. The 1950s was the heyday of recreational flight ideas; soon we would all vacation in the Sikorsky RV. However we still stubbornly refuse to embrace the chopper as a flying Winnebago. It's hard enough towing a caravan!
At #2: monorails. Why we still think this is futuristic is beyond me. It's certainly not faster than traditional rail and apart from shuttling people around theme parks or airports it's remained a niche proposition.
And of course, at #1: flying cars! We've been promised this for so long that I'm beginning to think it will never happen.
That's it for our paleo-futuristic look at Popular Mechanics. More gee-whizz history another time...
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Today in pulp I try to discover what the Bra Of The Future will look like... courtesy of Thrilling Wonder Stories!
Ever since the dawn of time Man has pondered the bra. What will it be like in the future? Will it even be needed?
And one magazine did more pondering than most. Thrilling Wonder Stories not only probed the mysteries of the future, it also tried to guess the evolution of the humble brassiere.
"The gun is GOOD! The Penis is EVIL!" bellows a huge stone head floating over the Irish countryside. It's quite a strange start to any film, but it's about to get even stranger.
This is the story of John Boorman's 1974 sci-fi spectacular Zardoz...
In 1970 director John Boorman began work on a Lord Of The Rings film for United Artists. It would be an unusual adaption; The Beatles would be the Hobbits and Kabuki theatre would open the movie. Alas the studio said 'No', but the idea of making a fantasy film stuck with Boorman.
So in 1972, following the commercial success of Deliverance, John Boorman started work on Zardoz - a fantasy film into which he would cram many unorthodox ideas. Initially Burt Reynolds was to play the lead role of Zed, but pulled out citing other filming commitments.
"Fear is the mind-killer," but movie production is a close second. As Denis Villeneuve's epic movie adaptations of Dune pull in audiences worldwide, I look back at an earlier struggle to bring that story to the silver screen.
This is the story of David Lynch's Dune...
Dune is an epic story: conceived by Frank Herbert after studying the Oregon Dunes in 1957 he spent five years researching, writing, and revising it before publication. He would go on to write a further five sequels.
Dune is a multi-layered story and a hugely immersive novel. It's about a future where the mind rather the computer is king, aided by the mysterious spice melange. It also has more feuding houses than Game of Thrones.
Detective stories have always been a staple of young adult fiction. I guess every young person wants to be a crime fighter at heart.
The Hardy Boys (Frank and Joe Hardy) are possibly the longest-serving teenage detectives. Their first adventures began in 1927, published by the Stratemeyer Syndicate and they've been in print pretty much ever since.