Paleo-Future

Bruce McCall's 2001 book The Last Dream-o-Rama is a brilliant, hilarious example of postmodern paleo-futurism (an obnoxiously academic term I came up with to describe co-opting past visions of the future). With a subtitle of "The Cars Detroit Forgot to Build, 1950-1960" this book is pure parody. Although, side-by-side with the sincere concept drawings of Driving Through Futures Past , one would be hard-pressed to tell the parody from the real thing. The illustration above is called the "HobbyPop RoadShop from 1958" which proclaims that Mom better drive smoother upstairs because, "Dad's trying to build a birdhouse downstairs!" More excerpts from the book appear ... Read Full Story

Paleo-Future readers in the Twin Cities may have noticed a certain blogger on the front page of today's St. Paul Pioneer Press . No, it wasn't my idea to pose, fake-blogging on my bed. We have a small apartment. The living room is filled with books and there's no place to sit. The photographer didn't have many options. A couple friends of mine made a bet about how early in the piece Disney or EPCOT would be mentioned. Nic won. He guessed the sixth paragraph. It was the fifth. Matt Novak has seen a vision of the future. A lot of visions. That's because ... Read Full Story

I was quoted today in the Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, Australia) for a piece about the past and future of cars . An excerpt appears below. In the first quarter of the 20th century, the developed world began an obsession with outer space. Comic-strip storyboards of domed futuristic cities and multilayered transport systems fired imaginations - and not just amongst children. Our automotive pioneers were also looking forward, working to propel the newborn car - the horseless carriage - to meet a vision. And, shape-wise, it looked bubbly. "The globule-shaped modes of transportation come from a 1930s obsession with streamlining," says Matt Novak, the ... Read Full Story

It was a year ago today that I started the Paleo-Future blog. With that first post I warned of my smarmy, cynical attitude toward the future. I still believe everything I wrote in that first post so out of laziness, my first blog post appears below. And I sincerely thank you for reading. I first came across the word "Paleo-Future" in a Flickr group of the same name. However, the topic first sparked my interest when I visited Walt Disney World's EPCOT Center, (now Epcot), and realized that Disney's version of the future was based upon what they thought the future would look like ... Read Full Story

Heliport/Railway Station Martin Kappler has scanned and uploaded a German poster from 1941 which shows Third Reich images of the paleo-future . The poster was in a book called Durch die weite Welt vol. XIX , one in a series of books for boys. Many thanks to Lee Garnett for the tip, and of course, Martin Kappler for scanning and translating this poster. The headline and main text read: What new things will the technology of tomorrow bring? Today still a venturous plan - tomorrow maybe reality Technology and economy in the Greater German Reich have gone into an unexpected upswing. The largest network ... Read Full Story