The Future Ain't What It Used to Be
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NATURE|Vol 454|28 August 2008 OPINION the book features handy diagrams and refer- The future ain’t what it used to be ences to all the best twentieth-century sci-fi. The only trouble is that, by definition, science son of Carl Sagan who, aside from his work moves so quickly that some entries in the book Future Proof/You Call This the Future? as a cosmologist, also wrote some outstanding are already out of date. For example, Babak by Nick Sagan sci-fi, including Contact. The excellent film Parviz and his colleagues from the University with Mark Frary and Andy Walker version with Jodie Foster in the lead is one of of Washington in Seattle recently announced Icon Books/Chicago Review Press: 2008. the less fanciful sci-fi films of the 1990s. that they are close to completing a contact 160 pp. £10.99/$14.95 Future Proof is the latest in a recent run of lens with embedded light-emitting diodes, guidebooks, such as Daniel H. Wilson’s Where’s the first step towards creating an in-eye dis- Rather than teleporting, or even arriving on My Jetpack?, about the fictional products imag- play reminiscent of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s a hoverboard, I rode to work this morning ined by sci-fi’s finest creators and how close relentless Terminator. Meanwhile, researchers on the distinctly nineteenth-century technol- we are to realizing those phenomena. Sagan’s from Imperial College London have published ogy of a bicycle on tarmac. Much to the relief journey includes terraforming by cyborgs and a paper describing an invisibility cloak — albeit of my colleagues, I don’t sit at my desk in a teleporting through wormholes. This snapshot still theoretical, and highly impractical. silver jumpsuit, and my lunch doesn’t come of all the bleeding-edge technology currently Nevertheless, Future Proof is a fun, use- in pill form. As a confirmed sci-fi geek, I available, even though it falls short of the fic- ful primer for understanding the symbiosis am perpetually disappointed that the things tion, suggests that human endeavour is a truly between science and science fiction. Perversely, promised to me by science fiction have not glorious thing — one that we too often take for I hope that this version of the book becomes yet arrived. granted. With his co-authors Mark Frary and redundant sooner rather than later. Good-quality sci-fi is concerned with the Andy Walker, Sagan writes casually well. And As an experiment in testing the limitations present, our current fears and hopes. The tech- of a highly futuristic invention, I wrote this nology imagined either drives plot, such as the review on my iPhone. It’s a touch-screen device human-powered virtual reality of the Matrix with so many slick functions that it sometimes movies, or is set-dressing, as in the film Alien feels indistinguishable from magic: when I first — at its core a haunted-house story. Alas, accu- turned it on, it creepily showed me where I was UNIV. WASHINGTON UNIV. rate fortune-telling in science fiction is rare. standing. I’ve become accustomed to its ways No one really predicted the dominance of the so quickly that I often find myself smudging personal computer over our lives, nor that the non-touch-screens in error. But as a typewriter rather low-tech medium of text-messaging for a 500-word book review, it was hopeless. I would become such a popular form of com- look forward to the day when my children will munication. As baseball legend Yogi Berra put puzzle and sneer at this crude silicon-based tri- it: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially corder prototype. Until then, I’m not imagina- about the future.” tive or foolish enough to dream up what their And that is the subject of Nick Sagan’s terrific essential devices might be. ■ new book. Sagan, a Hollywood screenwriter, Adam Rutherford is Nature Publishing Group’s carries a healthy pedigree in this field. He’s the Lenses that can project in-eye displays now exist. Podcast and Video editor. matured or non-American musical tastes, More cacophony than harmony which creates difficulties when he writes about “us” having “common ground” or indulges in The World In Six Songs: How the Musical tenacious in his devotion to pop music. such hyperbole as “our truth detectors go wild”. Brain Created Human Nature Granted, he alludes to a love for Beethoven’s Who, apart from US baby-boomers, might by Daniel J. Levitin Pastoral Symphony and mentions Mozart comprise this “us”? Dutton Books: 2008. 333 pp. $25.95 occasionally, but other musical genres seem of Far from restricting himself to six songs, far less importance to him. Listing “the musi- and setting aside that a different person might cal events that changed the way I would hear classify those songs differently, the author’s Six songs seems a small reper toire to address for the rest of my life”, every one is popular: repertoire of musical examples is vast. His so grandiose a theme. Yet Daniel Levitin con- Sting, Cannonball Adderley and Paul Simon collection of ‘friends’ seems equally extensive. tentiously argues for six classes of song in are among his favourites. It would be unthink- The text is littered with names — musicians his quickly published follow-on from This Is able for the author of a book on, say, the ‘picto- and research academics among them — and Your Brain On Music. He purports to explain rial brain’ or the ‘literary brain’ to ignore the their mention often seems calculated to neuro scientific concepts by framing them greatest examples of those arts or to reveal so impress rather than enlighten. Every signifi- around song themes of friendship, joy, com- enthusiastically that his tastes seem not to have cant thinker in his field sounds like a trusted fort, knowledge, religion and love. matured since his adolescence. intimate. Notwithstanding his claim that he “endeav- Levitin writes for a US audience of a certain This makes Levitin look fortunate but, even oured to include examples from music [from] age that has never outgrown its attachment if it were true, makes him intellectually vul- all over the world”, Levitin, a recording pro- to the music of its youth. There is little in The nerable. One is unlikely to be critical of the ducer turned academic psychologist, remains World in Six Songs to acknowledge those with work of such ‘friends’. And so it proves. When 1051.