Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past

How does an airplane stop? In fact, we do it by a kludge that is one of the least satisfactory parts of our flying technology: the airplane descends to the ground at flying speed, and only slows down after it is rolling along a lengthy runway. If it were not for this necessity, any airplane would be a perfectly usable flying car.

The bottom line is that it wasn’t just science fiction writers telling us that we would have flying cars. The people we expected to make them, and who themselves expected to make them, told us so as well.

This book is partly a reminiscence of what the pundits of the early and mid twentieth century—mostly science fiction writers—thought the future would bring; partly an investigation about why, or to what extent, it didn’t happen that way, and partly a prognostication about whether it could and under what circumstances it might come to pass after all... See more