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To introduce a New Scientist speaking event<\/a> at London’s Barbican centre on 29 June, I took a moment to wonder why\u00a0the present looks so futuristic<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Long before we can build something for real, we know how it will work and what it will require by way of materials and design. The steampunk genre gorges on Victorian designs for steam-powered helicopters (yes, there were such things) and the like, with films such as\u00a0Hugo<\/em>\u00a0(2011) and gaming apps such as\u00a080 Days<\/em>\u00a0(2014) telescoping the hard business of materials science into the twinkling of a mad professor\u2019s eye. Always, our imaginations run ahead of our physical abilities.<\/p>\n At the same time, science fiction is not at all naive, and almost all of it is about why our dreams of transcendence through technology fail: why the machine goes wrong, or works towards an unforeseen (sometimes catastrophic) end.\u00a0Blade Runner<\/em>\u00a0(1982) didn\u2019t so much inspire the current deluge of in-yer-face urban advertising as realise our worst nightmares about it.\u00a0Short Circuit<\/em>\u00a0(1986) knew what was wrong with robotic warfare long before the first Predator aircraft took to the skies.<\/p>\n So yes, science fiction enters clad in the motley of costume drama: polished, chromed, complete, not infrequently camp. But there\u2019s always a twist, a tear, a weak seam. This genre takes finery from the prop shop and turns it into something vital \u2013 a god, a golem, a puzzle, a prison. In science fiction, it matters where you are and how you dress, what you walk on and even what you breathe. All this stuff is contingent, you see. It slips about. It bites.<\/p>\n Sometimes,\u00a0 in this game of \u201cIt\u2019s behind you!\u201d less is more. In\u00a0Alphaville<\/em>\u00a0(1965), futuristic secret agent Lemmy Caution explores the streets of a distant space city, yet there is no set dressing to Alphaville: it is all dialogue, all cut \u2013 nothing more than a rhetorical veil cast over contemporary Paris.<\/p>\n More usually, you\u2019ll grab whatever\u2019s to hand \u2013 tinsel and Panstick and old gorilla costumes. Two years old by 1965, at least by Earth\u2019s reckoning, William Hartnell\u2019s Time Lord was tearing up the set of\u00a0Doctor Who<\/em>\u00a0and would, in other bodies and other voices, go on tearing up, tearing down and tearing through his fans\u2019 expectations for the next 24 years, production values be damned.<\/p>\n Bigger than its machinery, bigger even than its protagonist,\u00a0Doctor Who<\/em>\u00a0was, in that first, long outing, never in any sense realistic, and that was its strength. You never knew where you\u2019d end up next: a comedy, a horror flick or a Western-style showdown. The Doctor\u2019s sonic screwdriver was the whole point. It said, we\u2019re bolting this together as we go along.<\/p>\n What hostile critics say is true, in that science fiction sometimes is more about the machines than about the people.\u00a0Metropolis<\/em>\u00a0(1927) director Fritz Lang wanted a real rocket launch for the premiere of\u00a0Frau im Mond<\/em>\u00a0(1929) and roped in no less a physicist than Hermann Oberth to build it for him. When his 1.8-metre-tall liquid-propellant rocket came to nought, Oberth set about building a rocket 11 metres tall powered by liquid oxygen. They were going to launch it from the roof of the cinema. Luckily, they ran out of money.<\/p>\n The technocratic ideal may seem sterile now, but its promise was compelling: that we\u2019d all live lives of ease and happiness in space, the moon or Mars, watched over by loving machines \u2013 the Robinson family\u2019s stalwart Robot B-9 from\u00a0Lost in Space<\/em>, perhaps.<\/p>\n