Journalism

What it will be like in the future by Lee and Herring

In his ground breaking book The Shape of Things To Come sci-fi writer HG Wells astonished polite society with his amazing future predictions. He concluded that the shape of things to come would be rectangular, and you only have to look around at TVs and computers to see he got that pretty much right.
If you were a proper inventor or scientist back then you would have hated HG Wells. There you are spending all day in a laboratory trying to come up with a machine that would transform a cold cheese sandwich into a hot cheese sandwich and all HG does is make up a load of crap about invisible men, Martians catching cold and being grabbed by the Morlocks (very painful - copyright Les Dennis) and itÂ’s him whoÂ’s the millionaire. Then, to add insult to injury, you hear that Ian Breville up the road has beaten you to it with the sandwich thing. And youÂ’ve got nothing but some burnt bread and a hot cheese blistered tongue.
But HG was nobodyÂ’s twit. He knew that the most exciting thing about technology isnÂ’t what it can do in the present, itÂ’s fantasising about what it might be like in the future.
Our grandfatherÂ’s believed that people in the 1990s would holiday on the moon, that everyone would dress in silver suits, that weÂ’d have our food in the form of pills and our pills in the form of food (such as the amazing aspirin sprout). They endured poverty and fought wars safe in the knowledge that however bad things were for them, at least their grandchildren would live in a huge glass dome house which would contain an unusual looking plant.
How disappointed our grandfathers must be. Even the advances we’ve got are rubbish. Almost every home in the country has its own computer, but it’s only ever used to play Tetris, the internet can provide hours of entertainment, but only to people who like Red Dwarf and child pornography, mobile phones allow us to communicate with anyone, anywhere on the planet as long as the conversation we want to have is “Hello….Can you hear me? What? You’re breaking up”.
And the only pleasure we can get is listening to the modern day HG Wells, Judith Hann, telling us that in 2025 people will have computers in their brains, wheels instead of legs and that the shape of things to come will be rhomboid.