What Happened to Kids’ Books About the Future?
It wasn’t long ago that we had a future. I mean, we have one now — it’s not like the Earth is going to crash into the sun or anything. But you wouldn’t know that from looking at nonfiction books published over the past 20 or so years. When I was a kid in the 1990s, I was an avid consumer of all things science and outer space-related, and that meant reading a lot of books about what “The Future” would look like. Books like this one. And this one. And last but not least, this one. They were written by different writers, and put out by different publishers, but they all tended to follow a standard formula of showcasing what technology and transportation would look like in the future.
I’m not sure exactly when these books about the future (which were almost universally aimed at children) fell out of favor, but they were definitely in decline by the early 2000s. But that doesn’t explain why these kind of predictions stopped being made. It’s not too often you see an entire genre of nonfiction disappear from bookshelves, but I think you could make a strong case that this is exactly what happened to children’s books about the future. So, not to beat around the bush, what happened to those books?
It’s common, nowadays, to suggest that people are becoming more pessimistic about the future and this is why we don’t get “optimistic” portrayals of the future anymore. This was, after all, the logic behind Brad Bird’s surreal (and somewhat Objectivist) movie Tomorrowland, where the titular location is being destroyed by humanity’s refusal to imagine a hopeful future. But somehow I’m not convinced that’s what’s going on here. After all, taken purely in the abstract, the technologies these books imagined in the future were not inherently any more optimistic than the ones proposed by futurists today.
Was there some sort of gradual rejection of these books about the future once the actual year 2000 — so often held up at the time as the cutoff point for “The Future” — conspicuously failed to deliver on its promises? It certainly seems that way to me. The most recent example of this sort of futurism I can think of was the September 2005 issue of National Geographic Kids, which gave thirty predictions of what life would look like in the year 2035. Even then, my twelve-year-old self thought many of the predictions therein seemed either too far fetched or conversely too conservative.
Moreover, the predictions these books made often emphasized things that were in vogue with futurists at the time. In the 1980s and 1990s, when most of them were written, that meant an emphasis on things like vertical cities, space colonies, household robots, and hypersonic airline flights. The trajectory of technology, alas, has not proven to be as linear as writers of the past imagined. Vertical cities, hypersonic airliners, and space colonies are no closer to reality than they were thirty years ago, and household robots do exist, but not in the form most people imagined they would. Instead most of the technological advances of the past twenty or so years have been in areas such as smartphones, drones, and the Internet. There haven’t been any world-shattering breakthroughs, for example, in architecture or transportation.
One thing lot of these areas — transportation, architecture, robotics — had in common that lent them to children’s books was that they were both interesting to children and easy to illustrate. Most of the areas where major advances are being made today, by contrast, have neither of those qualities. It’s easy to sell a children’s book about the future if it has pictures of robots and space stations in it. But how would you do that for such things as the internet and social media? Perhaps the reason children’s books about the future have become so rare is because the technology we have today doesn’t really allow for them.
Or it could be more of a cultural zeitgeist thing. It’s hard for me to imagine someone sitting down in the year 2022 and writing a book about how awesome the future will be, at least with a straight face. Not because people have necessarily become more pessimistic, but because our expectations for what the future would hold have changed. I can imagine someone doing that in the 1990s, when there was little of geopolitical importance (at least from an American perspective) going on and it seemed like we as a society has fixed everything. The 21st Century — the real 21st Century, not the imagined one of futurists’ dreams — was like a jolt back to reality, with its long parade of horrors ranging from the War on Terror to Trump to COVID. Not only has technology not gone in the direction those old futurists imagined, neither has society.
It really does seem like the idea of children’s books about the future were something that could only exist in the 1980s and 1990s. It was a time when the mythical “Year 2000” was fast approaching, but still not so close that it couldn’t be used to speculate about what life might be like then. It was also a time when the Internet hadn’t yet transformed the world, and before the menaces of terrorism and nationalism threatened to tear America asunder. It was a time, in other words, when it was taken for granted that the future would improve upon the present.
As a child of the 1990s, I can’t help but feel nostalgic for this era. As a child, I was convinced this was going to be my future, that this would be my destiny when I grew up. I still read these old books from time to time, and wonder how different my life might be today if I lived in the worlds they imagined.
