Engine Summer

An interesting meditation on the history of the great utopian scientific dreams of the early twentieth century and the stories that were told about them, wrapped in something of a frame story, though not much of one, and beautifully drawn. This book begins at the 1939 World's Fair, undoubtedly the highlight of the Art Deco future-modernist fantasias, with its exhibits of models of the sort of city Fritz Lang thought up for Metropolis; it continues through 1975 and the end of the Apollo missions. In the interim it hits the major points of scientific progress, space exploration, and geopolitical fear, but I think the thing it does that I like the most is its careful, note-perfect re-creations of typical space-exploration whiz-bang comic books from the forties through sixties, correct in every detail down to disclaimers, publisher's prices, and bad four-color reproduction. Each of these mini-comics rings absolutely perfectly as an archetype of what the sf adventure story meant at that time.

The point, of course, is the evolution of the dream, especially the dream of space, and how what we got is not what anybody dreamed, though what we got is wondrous. I-- hm. I am of two minds about this.

On the one hand, this is a book with which I am in many ways in desperate ideological agreement. I want space flight, I always have. I cry when Thrud sings the chorus of 'Somebody Will': "And I am willing to sacrifice / something I don't have / for something I won't have/ so somebody will some day."

On the other hand, and Fies does notice this to some extent, the dreams of the past didn't have much space for me in them, did they? There's a sly joke in this book in the mini-comics, wherein every time the single female character opens her mouth she says something more sensible than anyone else in the series, and they ignore her completely and utterly. In the books from the forties and fifties I've read, well, par for the course, yes; at least this text knows that and is willing to comment a little. And this comic gets marginally less white as time progresses, makes a point of that, too, which is something. And Fies sees the totalitarianism and repression in the World of Tomorrow, the inexorable ties to forms of nationalism that weren't necessarily healthy.

But that's the reason I can't accept the characterization here of the seventies and eighties and onward as times full of despair and desperation and the death of the utopian ideal. Those are the decades where the dream focused inward, not outward, and the differences between the rights and social freedoms I have here/now as a woman and the ones I had even in the early eighties when I was a child are very large, and the differences between the rights and social freedoms I have here/now as a lesbian and the ones I had even in the late nineties when I was in high school are ridiculous. Not to even mention being genderqueer, I couldn't have thought about that in the eighties. I agree with Fies' major point, that the old forms of the dream are important, that the dream itself must be preserved, that optimism shouldn't go entirely under to irony. And yeah, there's a lot of irony around. I agree with his point that we do not get the utopias we imagine, we get different ones, and it's not going to be perfect.

It's just, look, for many years in my life the strongest symbol I had of the human striving for revolution and continual betterment was the existence of the Sex Pistols, okay? Genuinely the most life-affirming thing I could and in some ways can think of. And that's a kind of complexity I think this book doesn't quite get. The future is going to have to contain the by-products of irony and nihilism, and that's okay, because those things have their place and are pretty awesome, too-- and, in some cases, just as utopian. The dreams we can build of the future now should contain the previous aspirations, but they need to be more multivalent dreams.

In case you haven't noticed, I've been talking about this as a work of history and philosophy rather than as a work of fiction, and I encourage the reader to treat it as such. The frame story is cute and fun, but I don't think it's the core here.

Also, in case you haven't noticed, I do actually recommend this. I recommend most things that want to remind one of the history of ideas. I wouldn't be so picky about the nuances if this weren't fundamentally interesting, and if you're a space geek the nostalgia factor is impressive. Very well drawn, very well researched, very well done. Just, you know, not perfect. But then, the World of Tomorrow never was.