These French cards, archived at the Library of Congress, were produced sometime between 1890 and 1900. Most of the cards illustrate important feats from ballooning history between 1795-1846, while card number two (pictured above) depicts futuristic visions of flight from the 1800s. It's striking how similar these imagined flying machines are to those we looked at from 1885. The Paleo-Future Store features button sets of those paleo-futuristic flying machines from 1885, which you can check... Read Full Story
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... 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... 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... Read Full Story
In 1990, the late Michael Crichton published his most influential book. Sure, a lot of us loved 'State of Fear', but let's be honest - that's not his most popular book. If you haven't been under a rock through the '90s, you've probably heard of it - Jurassic Park. Of course, the series' portrayal of dinosaurs may have been a bit off (we now know the velociraptors had feathers, for example), but the idea was pure brilliance. Resurrecting animals from blood stored in preserved mosquitos... Read Full Story
