How Things Change

One of my favorite books as a kid, and a huge influence on my paintings as an adult, was the 1971 edition of the Childcraft Encyclopedia. (Okay, is anybody who knows me surprised? Didn't think so.) And one of my favorite volumes of that Encyclopedia was volume six - How Things Change. And one of my favorite chapters of that volume was called How Things Might Change, and it described the future like so:



(Yes, I must confess that I still have the whole Childcraft set stashed away in storage back in Chicago, and yes, I spent an hour or so last spring taking pictures of them instead of packing, and yes, I'm now sitting at my desk in China editing about thirty pictures of a forty-year-old children's encyclopedia from my hard drive and posting them onto the internet. Again, is anyone who knows me surprised? Oh, and fellow lunar living enthusiasts might want to check out more images in this set on Flickr...)

I'm not alone in really liking these images, and I think I know why. First, of course is the overall goofiness of the future as imagined in the late 1960s. Jet Packs! Flying Cars! Chicago to Tokyo in about an hour! On one level, we get to be all snarky and smug about everything they got wrong. And everything looks nice in the future. I'm particularly fond of this image:



Another plus in the Childcraft version of things: aside from this image (which really creeped me out as a kid - enough so that I'd skip the whole chapter), and this one (which creeps me out as an adult), there doesn't seem to be any suffering going on. I mean, there weren't any two-page spreads on "Life After A Massively Toxic Chemical Spill", or "If you were born Somewhere Else, You Could be Recruited as a Child Soldier in an Incredibly Bloody Civil War in a Country that the Rest of the World Doesn't Seem to Care About".

It's very easy to become cynical about their naive optimism, except that...



...danged if they didn't get a few things right. Anybody recognize this miracle device that they're describing in the picture above? Here I am, typing this all out on an Answer Machine (and using my carry phone as well), which was made possible by nothing other than somebody's goofy optimism.

Which brings us back to China. And optimism, and incredibly rapid change. And more importantly, the World Expo in Shanghai, which is the subject of my next post...