The Little World

Between fantasy and science fiction, and the chap with the space helmet, ray gun, and rocket back pack just shook his head.

So did his four-headed dragon, and that was a messy business. Took us half an hour to put out spot fires.

In the future, I shall just observe the future from a distance. I can see some constants in it; all the future clothes have winged epaulets, all the cloth is shiny, and it is never a good idea to go into a darkened room alone. Particularly if your shirt is red.

It would be as well to train yourself to greet others without handshaking. It’s not so much the fear of contagion, as the fact that a lot of the other denizens of the Universe don’t have hands to shake. A simple request to be taken to their leader is all that is needed, except if they are Austrians. Then you spell it lieder, and prepare yourself for the noise.

Of course the movie and television people have got to the thing long before the rest of us. Most of the things we think we see are there courtesy of studio designers and prop departments. Their spacecraft have the charm of being swooping and elegant – and are good subjects for plastic modelling. The less real, the better.

The other side of the coin – models of the actual things – belong on a different table. Werner von Braun’s designs were mostly successful, but tended to go up where he was and come down somewhere else – to no-one’s joy. The sci-fi table is a lot happier.