JF Ptak Science Books LLC

In an earlier post here I wrote about  living a big life in a big airplane–I saw this weird little print and was attracted to its unrepentent awfullness and the sleeky bulbous nature of this exotically unflyable aircraft.  I guess it bothered me becuase even though it was unsupportably  big it didn’t bother to have any of the luxurious features that other, similarly bloated-enormous aircraft had at the time:  swimming pools, greenhouses, landing strips for other planes…  This one didn’t have anything like that, and didn’t really seem to make any sense, unless that big belly part was actually a zeppelin or something like that, filled with helium–but even that doesn’t make sense.  Perhaps we need to assume that it is supported in the air by something yet named and unknowable, powered by engines that were far advanced.  But what is more interesting in the print are the multi-tiered auto-skyways and suspended nonsensical roads that hang between the skyscrapers like a gravity marble game.

These other cities of the future at least take a greater leap of faith in the belief of extraordinary inventions and abandon the generally stylized shape of known aircraft and propulsion systems.  At least for the next two images, even the architecture is mostly new.  What I’d really like to know is what people were doing in those buildings and where they were going in those hover cars.  For the most part in stories of the future like this people were simply going to work as they would in 1937, driving off with anti-gravity sumpin’ to Spacely Sprockets to do office work as it was in the past. 

 

 

For the most part future vision seemed grounded in the past, techno-wizzardry  carved into the fabric of existing society.  I’m not so sure what was so “futuristic” about elevated railways stacked up on top of each other like flapjacks, but to someone there in the 1930’s past it looked like a great thing about to happen….in 1965.