Your Flying Car Awaits by Paul Milo

I don't know if it's me in particular, or a general ennui that strikes the middle-aged in general, but my reading life has never really recovered from the one-two punch (more than a decade ago) of first losing my editorial job and then the flood that destroyed most of the books I owned. I still keep a list of books I want to read, and even add to it, now and then, but it's full of stuff from twenty years ago. I have what looks like a huge to-be-read backlog - most of three big bookcases - but it feels like that's mostly stuff that's been there since the post-flood restocking or  the random things that survived. And the "new" things I add - to the shelves, to the list, to my eyeballs by reading them - seem to mostly be old, either actually so (by decades, in many cases) or in style and tone and audience.

What I'm saying is: I feel like I used to be smart and connected and in charge. Nowadays, I've got a bunch of random oddball things that I poke through, and I read some of them, as I get farther and farther away from any literary or genre mainstream, or even coherent set of interests. I don't know if that's something I even could fix, but it comes to mind in particular when I find myself reading one of the most random books on my shelves.

Your Flying Car Awaits is definitely one of those. It's a 2009 non-fiction book by Paul Milo, which I got in 2014 for no particular reason. Working on this post, I learn that Milo is somewhat local to me: he's been a reporter in New Jersey for a couple of decades, so I've possibly read his by-lines more than I thought. (I first had an inkling when he said he researched much of this book at Montclair State University, whose train station I used to commute into NYC for a few years.)

Milo assembled a breezy but informative look at a whole lot of things that looked plausible but didn't actually happen. From cloning to flying cars to moon colonies to power "too cheap to meter" to domed cities, Milo runs through a few dozen interesting ideas in nine themed chapters, with short potted histories about things that seemed reasonable up until the point where something stopped them from happening.

This is a particularly good book for SF writers and readers, especially those around my age. We remember a lot of these predictions, and many SF people still passionately believe that fusion power or the great asteroid mining land-rush or L-5 colonies are right around the corner if only we believe hard enough. But Milo explains how contingent so many things are - some of the ideas here were impossible, and that became clear after further study, but most of them were entirely possible, and just didn't happen for various reasons. It just wasn't steam-engine time.

Some of the most intriguing sections are on things that have started to happen, or happen in different ways, since Milo wrote the book. He has a section on the videophone, which didn't happen as expected in the late 20th century, but Facetime and similar technologies are definitely used now and video conferences are a big thing in business. And he gets into self-driving cars, which still don't quite exist, but that area has seen a lot of activity and claims over the last two decades. So his message might not be as purely "this didn't happen" as a reader might think - it's closer to "at this point in time, it hasn't worked yet."

So Your Flying Car isn't directly dated in quite the way I expected. It's retrospective to begin with,. and mostly looking at mid-20th century ideas, so the landscape was settled - most of the time, for most of the things he writes about - at the time. It likely will continue dating, bit by bit, especially if we do get undersea cities or mainstream bug- or algae-based protein sources. For now, though, it's an entertaining survey of the ideas of a generation or so ago, and what happened to them on the way from big concept to failed idea.