The Future Is Not What It Ought

For A Start, There's Those Magic Smoke Flutes -
 - and I know, it should be 'There are' except that doesn't scan as well as 'There's', even if the former is generic and the latter is more specific.  Anyway, magic smoke flutes, which would have been beloved by Philip Kendred Dick, because - really, you want or need your nicotine fix without any of that nasty burning paper or vegetable matter?  Bingo!  Magic smoke flute is here.  Art?

Addiction in convenient handy package!

     What I wanted to point out is that the future is not shaping up as all those science-fiction authors of the Golden Age foresaw.  For one thing, Hom.  Sap. has discovered that nuclear power stations come with some drawbacks, because we only have atomic fission at present - no sign of nuclear fusion on the horizon anytime soon.  Then, we are utilising wind power via turbines to an extent nobody could have predicted back in the Fifties.  Art?

     Up to a third of all Perfidious Albion's electrickery produced by WHIRLING BLADES OF DEATHLY DOOM!*
     Still waiting for my flying car, though.
     Now, time to wrap the motley in clingfilm and leave it at the back of the fridge!
     (No pools of liquid terror today).

Fusion-Powered Fiction
Well, I suppose I'd better warn you that HERE BE SPOILERS concerning 'The Expanse',as I have just finished watching the last episode of Season 2, and a fitting end it was, too.  Or, perhaps I should say, 'un-fitting'.  It's slightly different from the novels, for dramatic reasons, as the 'Trivia' page about it on IMDB informs.
     Anyway, there's Naomi and Prax, footling about on the exterior of the 'Rocinante', cradling what appears to be the plutonium core of a missile warhead - we'll come back to that later on - in order to lure an hideous protomolecular monster out of the cargo hold.  HPM's are known to love radiation, you see. 

Hard to house-train

     They manage this feat, and before the HPM can seize hold of them and render them unto the sweepings on a butcher's floor, Prax throws the core to the rear of the ship.  The HPM is thus manoeuvred into the path of the Roci's Epstein drive, which turns it into plasma in about a picosecond.  Art?

Roast HPM coming up!

     Reminiscent, I feel, of Gollum's end in the fires of Mount Doom as he clutches his Precious.  The HPM is so busy cuddling and gloating over it's plutonium pudding that it never sees the fusion spike coming.  There you go, more about nuclear power.
     Don't go away!  At the climax of this episode a UN research ship is making a powered descent to the surface of Venus, there to examine the crater made when the asteroid Eros crashed into it. 
     "But wait!" burbled your humble scribe.  "That crewmember looked suspiciously like Adam Savage!"  Art?

From "Mythbusrers"

     That's because it was him.  Adam is a big fan of the show and managed to parlay his celebrity status into getting a cameo.  Don't get excited, he isn't on-screen for long as the whole ships gets mysteriously disintegrated to bits by the protomolecular-muddled Eros.
        Quickly, abort the missile launch!  Interception will fragment bacilli-carrying warheads!

      Just testing.  It's a quote from "The Omega Man" and although striking it's also rather silly if you follow it through.  Imagine a ballistic interception taking place 150 miles uptrack from the target; your anti-missile missile is going to go bang in a mass of high-explosive, which is very bad for bacilli in the locale, not to mention the long slow drift through the atmosphere, where all sorts of radiation will be queuing up to zap those microbes of mischief.  Conrad cannot help but think that not intercepting those bacilli carrying warheads is the riskier option.
     Don't forget, this is 1971 we're talking about, when South Canada saw fit to defend itself with nuclear-tipped rockets, a design known as the "Genie", and one of these going off would make all the difference mentioned above, except more so.  Quite whom decided that a rocket - NOT a missile, an unguided rocket - with a 1.5 kiloton-yield  warhead was a splendid idea is open to question.  Possibly a manager on secondment from First Bus.  They were no mere flash in the pan, either, because 3,000 were produced.  After all, when you're lighting up the sky with atomic firecrackers, quantity is important!

Er - Spirit in the Sky, anyone?

     We do seem to have gone round in a circle and ended up with nuclear warheads again, don't we?  Well, in another way that the present doesn't mirror what fiction folks of the Fifties expected, you've we've not wiped ourselves out.**





*  Forgive me my drama, I had a Doctor Who Title Moment.  Also, no horrid cheap puns.
**  Yet.