Deadline

I've got two deadlines due today,  so posting will be a bit spotty through tomorrow.

Man in Space

Magic Highway

Mars and Beyond

Colliers in space

We've covered the Colliers/Von Braun space plan in various sections of Future Space, but Dreams of Space has some marvelous scans of the original Colliers magazine layouts.

Tomorrow's terrorists

Paleofutures looks at yesterday's predictions about fighting the terrorists of tomorrow.

Apparently, it involves really bad helmets.

Mysteries of Space

She also has problems with phone boxes, public transport and small Italian cars.

The mystery isn't how she got hold of a spacesuit from You Only Live Twice or what she's doing with it, it's how she got that helmet on over that hairdo with the alarming chopsticks jutting out.

Leon Theremin demonstrates

Leon Theremin demonstrates the instrument he invented and carries his name.

Rendezvous in Space

From the 1964 New York World's Fair. The blacked out sequence is because a real model of a docking spacecraft in the theatre took over the action. Decades later and still no "monthly milk run". But we do have pocket phones in Patagonia.

Radio diagnosis

Paleofuture looks at radio diagnosis, which is part of our Hugo Gernsback section.

I hate to say this, but even with the technical set up illustrated, it still looks about as practical as making a diagnosis with a pair of chop sticks.

Space Cyborg

Spacesuits can be so cumbersome, what with all that donning and doffing and trying not to die of explosive decompression, so why not cut out the middleman and just turn astronauts into cyborgs designed to survive in space as is?

I can think of a couple of reasons, but two come to the top of my list:

1. It might be hard to find volunteers to be turned into proto-Cybermen
2. Those you do find will probably the last ones you'd want to use–or be left alone in a room with.

The Hover Scooter

Future streets

This 1925 vision of the city of the future always fascinated me.  Why bother with one boring ground-level street system with an underground train at most leading off into the suburbs when you can turn a metropolis into one massive labyrinth of tunnels, warrens and terraces that no one ever leaves in their lives because everyone is hopelessly lost.

Grey Walter's tortises

A remarkable story of early cybernetics.

Who would have thought that the start of the robot apocalypse would be so charming

The future of reading

And what problem does this solve? 

Paleofuture looks at what they call the iPad of 1935.

More of a Kindle, I'd say.

Tales of Future Past goes blog

Tales of Future Past has been up and running since 1 January 2004 and what started out as a three-week project expanded into an eight-year career that still sees no end in sight.  Unfortunately, it's become something of a victim of its own success since the larger it gets the more maintenance it requires and the older it gets the more apparent it becomes that it will one day need a major revamp.  All this makes it very hard to find the time and energy I'd like to add new material as fast as I'd like.  Also, other people have taken up the banner of Future Past, starting blogs and sites dedicated to the same topic and they need to be exposed to a larger audience to do them justice.

With both of these problems in mind, I've decided to start a new blog as a companion to my other three (Ephemeral Isle, The Quill & The Keyboard and Reel Ranting) as well as to the main Tales of Future Past site where I can post material that will either be incorporated later into Tales of Future Past, miscellaneous stuff that doesn't quite fit into any of the TOFP sections and a gathering of Future Past news from around the Web as I stumble across it.

Since I'm already running three blogs and have to make this thing I like to call a "living", this won't be a daily blog, but more of what there is as I come across it, though I find quite a bit out there and I'll be cross posting Future Past items from Ephemeral Isle, so this won't exactly be filled with stale biscuits.   However, I would recommend subscribing to the RSS feed to insure against missing anything.

Enjoy.

Space Station V

Unwanted Blog has some pretty impressive blueprints of 2001: a Space Odyssey's  Space Station V.

They don't make 'em like they used to.