THE SHAPE OF CHRISTMASES TO COME
by Hank Davis
LAST YEAR, in the introduction to A Cosmic Christmas, I publicly mused that it was hard to find anything to say about Christmas that hasn’t already been said. Now I have to say something about Christmas that I haven’t already said.
Well . . .
How’s the weather out? Read any good books lately?
Welllll . . .
Let’s take a stroll down Memory Lane (watch for the landmines).
Last time I considered how science fictional some of the gifts under the present-day tree would have seemed just three or four decades ago, such as laptop computers, cell phones, GPS units, etc. That reminds me of the high-tech toys from the 1950s when I was a rotten kid. “High-tech” for the time, that is.
One of them, from Christmas 1955 if memory serves, was a battery powered thing shaped like a futuristic bus. I don’t remember its name (and I’m too lazy to try to find it online), but it had a plastic radar-dish-like antenna on its top that was really only a directional guide. It came with a spherical whistle, a very low-pitched whistle. The bus moved slowly across the floor, but when the aforementioned rotten kid blew on the whistle, something inside would turn the front wheels. The “antenna” would also rotate, so that you could gauge which way the bus was about to turn, and stop blowing when the antenna was pointing in the direction you wanted it to go. The bus would also have unanticipated changes of course if the TV happened to be on and a voice or sound on TV happened to hit the right pitch, briefly redirecting the angle of the wheels.
Now this seems very primitive now, what with cars, tanks, helicopters and robots which are electronically, rather than sonically, remote-controlled. But it was an unusual item then.
Or there was the gadget (again, of unremembered name) which looked like a cartoonist’s idea of a radio station, complete with two plastic antenna on top which did absolutely nothing but look decorative. It came with two handheld communicators. When both of them were hooked up to the station by wires (yes, wires), the holder of one communicator could talk to the other and almost hear what the other was saying, as long as there was no loud ambient noise in the room . Of course, the wires that came with it weren’t very long, so you couldn’t talk much more than from one room to another. It was an advance on the old tin cans connected by string setup, but not much of an advance.
Then there was the airplane flight simulator, though I don’t think it was called that. It was mostly mechanical. There was a small pilot’s wheel on the front, and a window with a little airplane silhouette on a wire that went across the window. The airplane cutout would move left or right as you turned the wheel, while a strip of paper inside the gadet rolled from the top of the window to the bottom, as if the plane were flying over terrain. On the strip was a red line that moved from side to side, and you moved the plane to stay on the red line as it wavered back and forth. If you got off the line, you supposedly were off the radio directional beam and there was a beep.
I could go on—I haven’t yet mentioned Robert the Robot, with a tiny acoustic phonograph inside, so that he would talk when the crank on his back was rapidly turned—but I’ll stop there.
It isn’t surprising that these toys seem downright neolithic now—there have been considerable advances in electronics in nearly six decades, after all—but consider the shape of toys to come, circa 2013. Barring atomic war, worldwide plague, an unexpected visit from an asteroid, or mass entinction due to watching reality shows, the toys of the present day will probably seem just as primitive by 2073. (Which, come to think of it, will be three years before the American Tricentennial. Lay in a supply of fireworks early, they may be completely outlawed by then.) What then will be a state-of-the-art high-tech toy?
Science fiction has thoroughly covered the idea of robots made to look like children to be playmates for the old-fashioned human children, or maybe child substitutes for parents, but that might be a possibility. Or maybe a holographic image of a child would be even better. They’re intangible and can’t break. And they can’t break those fragile human kids if they go out of skew on treadle.
One thing about the mid-1950s toys is that they could only do one or maybe two things, and that was it. Which led to them ending up in the attic or a closet once the thrill was gone. Unless imagination took over, and the airplane simulator became the control wheel of a spaceship, zoom! zoom! That’s still true of some modern toys, but not with electronic games. If you get tired of one game, you can plug in a different cartridge for another one. (Anybody remember board games?) Maybe toys can be made to be modifiable. Suppose you get tired of a toy, and can push a button to make it change shape to something else, like the soft weapon in the Larry Niven story.
Or maybe the ultimate toy will be something like the “feelies” in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. (Are there still English professors who insist that novel isn’t science fiction?) Put an electronic thingy on your head and suddenly you’re there, wherever there is. Back in time with—hmmm, probably not cowboys and Indians, unless the 21st century flushes the currently omnipresent Political Correctness crap—but maybe the age of chivalry with knights in armor (without the fleas and lice, of course), or the stone age (will Neanderthals have to be treated with Political Correctness?), or be the first on your block to be a T-Rex in the Cretaceous. Or go forward in time with starships of the future (will Star Trek still be popular?). Be John Carter of Mars. Be a Gray Lensman. Be Eric John Stark. Be Jirel of Joiry. Be Ferdinand Feghoot. (They’ll all be in public domain by then.) Of course, the grown-ups will have to make sure that the kids don’t get hold of the adult feelie recordings . . .
Or maybe the kids will visit the more recent past, like the 20th century when the kids had toys that didn’t have electronics. Or even moving parts! (I direct your attention to Isaac Asimov’s story, “The Fun They Had.”)
But there’s one toy that I don’t think they’ll have to play with via virtual reality. I’m sure that the Slinky will still be around . . .
—Hank Davis