How Russian Artists Imagined in 1914 What Moscow Would Look Like in 2259

in History, Sci Fi | July 14th, 2026

In the days of pop­u­lar retro­fu­tur­ism—say, the first half of the twen­ti­eth century—people tend­ed to imag­ine the world of tomor­row look­ing very much like the world of today, only with a lot more fly­ing cars, mono­rails, and video­phones. This is true whether those doing the imag­in­ing were titans of indus­try, mar­ket­ing mavens, ide­al­is­tic Sovi­ets, or sub­jects of the Tsar, though we might think that peo­ple liv­ing under an ancient monar­chi­cal sys­tem might not expect much change. In some ways we might be right, but as we can see in the 1914 post­cards here—printed as Rus­sia entered World War I—the coun­try did antic­i­pate a mod­ern, tech­no­log­i­cal future, though one that still close­ly resem­bled its present.

Per­haps few but the most far-sight­ed of Rus­sians pre­dict­ed what the ail­ing empire would endure in the years to come—the dis­as­ter of the Great War, and the waves of Rev­o­lu­tion and Civ­il War. Cer­tain­ly, who­ev­er paint­ed these images fore­saw no such cat­a­stroph­ic upheaval.

Although pur­port­ing to show us a view of Moscow in the 23rd cen­tu­ry, they show the city very hap­pi­ly “still under monar­chi­cal rule,” writes A Jour­ney Through Russ­ian Cul­ture, going about its dai­ly life just as it did over three hun­dred years ear­li­er, “with the addi­tion of every­thing from sub­ways to air­borne pub­lic trans­porta­tion, things prob­a­bly seen as stan­dard meth­ods of trans­port for the future.”

Of course, there would be hot-rod­ded sleds on St. Peters­burg High­way with head­lights, fan­cy wind­shields, and what look like Christ­mas elves perched in them. Lubyan­s­ka Square, fur­ther up, would still host mil­i­tary parades of men on horse­back, as chil­dren whiz by on motor­bikes and sub­way trains rum­ble under­neath. The Cen­tral Rail­way Sta­tion, above, might seem entire­ly unchanged, until one looks up, and sees ele­vat­ed trams stream­ing out of the ter­mi­nal like spider’s silk. Red Square, how­ev­er, just below, would appar­ent­ly host drag races, while peo­ple in trams and giant diri­gi­bles look on from above.

The images have a children’s book qual­i­ty about them and the fes­tive air of hol­i­day cards. They were appar­ent­ly redis­cov­ered only recent­ly when a choco­late com­pa­ny called Eyinem reprint­ed them on their pack­ag­ing. Like so much retro­fu­tur­ism, these seem—in their bustling, yet safe, cheer­ful orderliness—tailor-made for nos­tal­gic trips through Petro­vsky Park, rather than imag­i­na­tive leaps into the great unknown. For that, we must turn to Russ­ian Futur­ism, which, both before and after World War I and the Rev­o­lu­tion, imag­ined, helped bring about, but did­n’t quite sur­vive the mas­sive tech­no­log­i­cal and polit­i­cal dis­rup­tion of the next two decades.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sovi­et Artists Envi­sion a Com­mu­nist Utopia in Out­er Space

How the Sovi­ets Imag­ined in 1960 What the World Would Look in 2017: A Gallery of Retro-Futur­is­tic Draw­ings

Down­load Russ­ian Futur­ist Book Art (1910–1915): The Aes­thet­ic Rev­o­lu­tion Before the Polit­i­cal Rev­o­lu­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC.

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Isaac Asimov Laments the “Cult of Ignorance” in the United States (1980)

in Education, Politics, Sci Fi | July 1st, 2026

Rochester Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In 1980, sci­en­tist and writer Isaac Asi­mov argued in an essay that “there is a cult of igno­rance in the Unit­ed States, and there always has been.” That year, the Repub­li­can Par­ty stood at the dawn of the Rea­gan Rev­o­lu­tion, which ini­ti­at­ed a decades-long con­ser­v­a­tive groundswell. Polit­i­cal strate­gist Steve Schmidt (who has been regret­ful about choos­ing Sarah Palin as John McCain’s run­ning mate in 2008) once point­ed to what he called “intel­lec­tu­al rot” as a pri­ma­ry cul­prit, and a cult-like devo­tion to irra­tional­i­ty among a cer­tain seg­ment of the elec­torate.

It’s a famil­iar con­tention. There have been cri­tiques of Amer­i­can anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism since the country’s found­ing, though whether or not that phe­nom­e­non has inten­si­fied, as Susan Jaco­by alleged in The Age of Amer­i­can Unrea­son, may be a sub­ject of debate. Not all of the unrea­son is par­ti­san, as fail­ures to chal­lenge human- and AI-gen­er­at­ed mis­in­for­ma­tion in polit­i­cal news sources and social media out­lets over recent years have shown. But “the strain of anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism,” writes Asi­mov, “has been a con­stant thread wind­ing its way through our polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al life, nur­tured by the false notion that democ­ra­cy means that ‘my igno­rance is just as good as your knowl­edge.’”

Asimov’s pri­ma­ry exam­ples hap­pen to come from the polit­i­cal world. How­ev­er, he doesn’t name con­tem­po­rary names but reach­es back to take a swipe at Eisen­how­er (“who invent­ed a ver­sion of the Eng­lish lan­guage that was all his own”) and George Wal­lace. Par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing is Asimov’s take on the “slo­gan on the part of the obscu­ran­tists: ‘Don’t trust the experts!’” This lan­guage, along with charges of “elit­ism,” Asi­mov wry­ly notes, is so often used by peo­ple who are them­selves experts and elites, “feel­ing guilty about hav­ing gone to school.” So many of the Amer­i­can polit­i­cal class’ wounds are self-inflict­ed, he sug­gests, but that’s because they are behold­en to a large­ly igno­rant elec­torate:

To be sure, the aver­age Amer­i­can can sign his name more or less leg­i­bly, and can make out the sports headlines—but how many nonelit­ist Amer­i­cans can, with­out undue dif­fi­cul­ty, read as many as a thou­sand con­sec­u­tive words of small print, some of which may be tri­syl­lab­ic?

Asimov’s exam­ples are less than con­vinc­ing: road signs “steadi­ly being replaced by lit­tle pic­tures to make them inter­na­tion­al­ly leg­i­ble” has more to do with lin­guis­tic diver­si­ty than illit­er­a­cy, and accus­ing tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials of speak­ing their mes­sages out loud instead of using print­ed text on the screen seems to fun­da­men­tal­ly mis­un­der­stand the nature of the medi­um. Jaco­by in her book-length study of the prob­lem looks at edu­ca­tion­al pol­i­cy in the Unit­ed States, and the resis­tance to nation­al stan­dards that vir­tu­al­ly ensures wide­spread pock­ets of igno­rance all over the coun­try. Asimov’s very short, pithy essay has nei­ther the space nor the incli­na­tion to con­duct such analy­sis.

Instead he is con­cerned with atti­tudes. Not only are many Amer­i­cans bad­ly edu­cat­ed, he writes, but the broad igno­rance of the pop­u­la­tion in mat­ters of “sci­ence… math­e­mat­ics… eco­nom­ics… for­eign lan­guages…” has as much to do with Amer­i­cans’ unwill­ing­ness to read as their inabil­i­ty.

There are 200 mil­lion Amer­i­cans who have inhab­it­ed school­rooms at some time in their lives and who will admit that they know how to read… but most decent peri­od­i­cals believe they are doing amaz­ing­ly well if they have cir­cu­la­tion of half a mil­lion. It may be that only 1 per cent—or less—of Amer­i­cans make a stab at exer­cis­ing their right to know. And if they try to do any­thing on that basis they are quite like­ly to be accused of being elit­ists.

One might in some respects charge Asi­mov him­self of elit­ism when he con­cludes, “We can all be mem­bers of the intel­lec­tu­al elite.” Such a blithe­ly opti­mistic state­ment ignores the ways in which eco­nom­ic elites active­ly manip­u­late edu­ca­tion pol­i­cy to suit their inter­ests, crip­ple edu­ca­tion fund­ing, and oppose efforts at free or low cost high­er edu­ca­tion. Many efforts at spread­ing knowledge—like the Chau­tauquas of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, the edu­ca­tion­al radio pro­grams of the 40s and 50s, and the pub­lic tele­vi­sion rev­o­lu­tion of the 70s and 80s—have been ad hoc and near­ly always imper­iled by fund­ing crises and the designs of prof­i­teers.

Nonethe­less, the wide­spread (though hard­ly uni­ver­sal) avail­abil­i­ty of free resources on the inter­net has made self-edu­ca­tion a real­i­ty for many peo­ple, and cer­tain­ly for most Amer­i­cans. But per­haps not even Isaac Asi­mov could have fore­seen the bit­ter polar­iza­tion and dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns that tech­nol­o­gy has also enabled. Need­less to say, “A Cult of Igno­rance” was not one of Asimov’s most pop­u­lar pieces of writ­ing. First pub­lished on Jan­u­ary 21, 1980 in Newsweek, the short essay has nev­er been reprint­ed in any of Asimov’s col­lec­tions.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Isaac Asi­mov Reviews George Orwell’s Nine­teen Eighty-Four and Calls It “Not Sci­ence Fic­tion, But a Dis­tort­ed Nos­tal­gia for a Past that Nev­er Was”

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts the Future on The David Let­ter­man Show (1980)

Isaac Asi­mov on How Libraries Can Rad­i­cal­ly Change Your Life (1971)

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like in 2014

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

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Isaac Asimov Reviews George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Calls It “Not Science Fiction, But a Distorted Nostalgia for a Past that Never Was”

in Books, Literature, Sci Fi | April 13th, 2026

Here in the twen­ty-twen­ties, a young read­er first hear­ing of George Orwell’s Nine­teen Eighty-Four would hard­ly imag­ine it to be a work of sci­ence fic­tion. That would­n’t have been the case in 1949, when the nov­el was first pub­lished, and when the epony­mous year would have sound­ed like the dis­tant future. Even as the actu­al nine­teen-eight­ies came around, it still evoked visions of a tech­no-total­i­tar­i­an dystopia ahead. “So thor­ough­ly has 1984-opho­bia pen­e­trat­ed the con­scious­ness of many who have not read the book and have no notion of what it con­tains, that one won­ders what will hap­pen to us after 31 Decem­ber 1984,” wrote Isaac Asi­mov in 1980. “When New Year’s Day of 1985 arrives and the Unit­ed States is still in exis­tence and fac­ing very much the prob­lems it faces today, how will we express our fears of what­ev­er aspect of life fills us with appre­hen­sion?”

The occa­sion was one of a series of syn­di­cat­ed news­pa­per columns that Asi­mov seems to have pub­lished each new year. At the dawn of Nine­teen Eighty-Four’s decade, the syn­di­cate asked him to revis­it Orwell’s nov­el, which had already been a com­mon cul­tur­al ref­er­ence for decades. As a work of sci­ence fic­tion (the genre for which his own name had prac­ti­cal­ly come to stand), he finds it lack­ing, to say the least. “The Lon­don in which the sto­ry is placed is not so much moved thir­ty-five years for­ward in time, from 1949 to 1984, as it is moved a thou­sand miles east in space to Moscow,” he writes. Far from attempt­ing to imag­ine the future, in Asi­mov’s view, Orwell sim­ply con­vert­ed the Eng­land he knew into a drea­ry Stal­in­ist-type state. Apart from cer­tain implau­si­ble sur­veil­lance sys­tems, the set­ting is “incred­i­bly old-fash­ioned when com­pared with the real world of the 1980s.”

Orwell does­n’t even both­er to imag­ine any new vices: “His char­ac­ters are all gin hounds and tobac­co addicts,” Asi­mov writes, “and part of the hor­ror of his pic­ture of 1984 is his elo­quent descrip­tion of the low qual­i­ty of the gin and tobac­co.” That telling detail hints at one of Orwell’s major sources of inspi­ra­tion: the British Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion, his wife’s employ­er dur­ing World War II, and the source of the mate­r­i­al he broad­cast to India while work­ing at the BBC around the same time.  The Min­istry’s can­teen, accord­ing to his let­ters, was not of the high­est stan­dard. What’s more, the 850-word “Basic Eng­lish” that it insist­ed on using in its broad­casts bears more than a pass­ing resem­blance to Nine­teen Eight-Four’s Newspeak, the pared-down lan­guage devel­oped and man­dat­ed by the gov­ern­ment in order to lim­it its cit­i­zens’ range of thought.

Asi­mov does­n’t buy that either. “There is no sign that such com­pres­sions of the lan­guage have ever weak­ened it as a mode of expres­sion,” he writes. “As a mat­ter of fact, polit­i­cal obfus­ca­tion has tend­ed to use many words rather than few, long words rather than short, to extend rather than to reduce.” (This, of course, was some­thing Orwell knew.) What­ev­er Nine­teen Eighty-Four’s short­com­ings as prophe­cy, sci-fi, or indeed lit­er­a­ture, Asi­mov does cred­it Orwell with a cer­tain geopo­lit­i­cal savvy. Its world-rul­ing trio of Ocea­nia, Eura­sia, and Eas­t­a­sia “fits in, very rough­ly, with the three actu­al super­pow­ers of the 1980s: the Unit­ed States, the Sovi­et Union, and Chi­na.” Orwell knew, as many did­n’t, that the lat­ter two would not join forces, per­haps thanks to his own frus­trat­ing expe­ri­ence fight­ing for fac­tion­al­ism-prone left caus­es. But not even as future-ori­ent­ed a mind as Asi­mov’s would have guessed that, just a few years lat­er, the USSR would be out of the game — and a few decades lat­er, the word Orwellian would be applied most often to Chi­na.

Read Asi­mov’s take on 1984 here.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to George Orwell

An Intro­duc­tion to George Orwell’s 1984 and How Pow­er Man­u­fac­tures Truth

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

George Orwell’s Har­row­ing Race to Fin­ish 1984 Before His Death

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like in 2014

Rid­ley Scott on the Mak­ing of Apple’s Icon­ic “1984” Com­mer­cial, Aired on Super Bowl Sun­day in 1984

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Hear Aldous Huxley Read Brave New World. Plus 84 Classic Radio Dramas from CBS Radio Workshop (1956–57)

in Radio, Sci Fi | February 25th, 2026


We seem to be liv­ing through yet anoth­er major moment for pod­cast­ing. Over the past two decades, the medi­um has gone from niche exper­i­ment to main­stream habit, becom­ing a reg­u­lar part of how we learn, enter­tain our­selves, and pass the time. The pop­u­lar­i­ty of podcasts—in an age of ubiq­ui­tous screens and per­pet­u­al distractions—speaks to some­thing deep with­in us. Oral sto­ry­telling, as old as human speech, nev­er real­ly dis­ap­pears. The medi­um evolves, plat­forms shift, dis­tri­b­u­tion changes—but the basic appeal remains con­stant.

But the dif­fer­ences between this gold­en age of pod­cast­ing and the gold­en age of radio are still sig­nif­i­cant. Where the pod­cast is often off-the-cuff, and often very inti­mate and personal—sometimes seen as “too personal”—radio pro­grams were almost always care­ful­ly script­ed and fea­tured pro­fes­sion­al tal­ent. Even those pro­grams with man-on-the street fea­tures or inter­views with ordi­nary folks were care­ful­ly orches­trat­ed and medi­at­ed by pro­duc­ers, actors, and pre­sen­ters. And the busi­ness of scor­ing music and sound effects for radio pro­grams was a very seri­ous one indeed. All of these formalities—in addi­tion to the lim­it­ed fre­quen­cy range of old ana­log record­ing technology—contribute to what we imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­nize as the sound of “old time radio.” It is a quaint sound, but also one with a cer­tain grav­i­tas, an echo of a bygone age.

That gold­en age waned as tele­vi­sion came into its own in the mid-fifties, but near its end, some broad­cast com­pa­nies made every effort to put togeth­er the high­est qual­i­ty radio pro­gram­ming they could in order to retain their audi­ence. One such pro­gram, the CBS Radio Work­shop, which ran from Jan­u­ary, 1956 to Sep­tem­ber, 1957, may have been “too lit­tle too late”—as radio preser­va­tion­ist site Dig­i­tal Deli writes—but it nonethe­less was “every bit as inno­v­a­tive and cut­ting edge” as the pro­grams that came before it.

cbs-radio-workshop

The first two episodes, right below, were drama­ti­za­tions of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, read by the author him­self. The series’ remain­ing 84 pro­grams drew from the work of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, James Thurber, H.L. Menck­en, Mark Twain, Robert Hein­lein, Eugene O’Neill, Balzac, Carl Sand­burg, and so many more. It also fea­tured orig­i­nal com­e­dy, dra­ma, music, and This Amer­i­can Life-style pro­files and sto­ry­telling.

Hux­ley returned in pro­gram #12, with a sto­ry called “Jacob’s Hands,” writ­ten in col­lab­o­ra­tion with and read by Christo­pher Ish­er­wood. The great Ray Brad­bury made an appear­ance, in pro­gram #4, intro­duc­ing his sto­ries “Sea­son of Dis­be­lief” and “Hail and Farewell,” read by John Dehn­er and Sta­cy Har­ris, and scored by future film and TV com­pos­er Jer­ry Gold­smith. Oth­er pro­grams, like #10, “The Exur­ban­ites,” nar­rat­ed by famous war cor­re­spon­dent Eric Sevareid, con­duct­ed prob­ing inves­ti­ga­tions of mod­ern life—in this case the growth of sub­ur­bia and its rela­tion­ship to the adver­tis­ing indus­try. The above is but a tiny sam­pling of the wealth of qual­i­ty pro­gram­ming the CBS Radio Work­shop pro­duced, and you can hear all of it—all 86 episodes—courtesy of the Inter­net Archive.

Sam­ple stream­ing episodes in the play­er above, or down­load indi­vid­ual pro­grams as MP3s and enjoy them at your leisure, almost like, well, a pod­cast. See Dig­i­tal Deli for a com­plete run­down of each program’s con­tent and cast, as well as an exten­sive his­to­ry of the series. This is the swan song of gold­en age radio, which, it seems, maybe nev­er real­ly left, giv­en the incred­i­ble num­ber of lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ences we still have at our dis­pos­al. Yes, some­day our pod­casts will sound quaint and curi­ous to the ears of more advanced lis­ten­ers, but even then, I’d bet, peo­ple will still be telling and record­ing sto­ries, and the sound of human voic­es will con­tin­ue to cap­ti­vate us as it always has.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear 230 Episodes of Escape: Clas­sic Radio Dra­mas of Sto­ries by Ray Brad­bury, Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells & More (1947–1954)

X Minus One: Hear Clas­sic Sci-Fi Radio Sto­ries from Asi­mov, Hein­lein, Brad­bury & Dick

Dimen­sion X: The 1950s Sci­Fi Radio Show That Dra­ma­tized Sto­ries by Asi­mov, Brad­bury, Von­negut & More

Hear 90+ Episodes of Sus­pense, the Icon­ic Gold­en Age Radio Show Launched by Alfred Hitch­cock

Hear 149 Vin­tage Hal­loween Radio Shows from the Gold­en Age of Radio

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

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Isaac Asimov Predicts the Future on The David Letterman Show (1980)

in Sci Fi, Television | December 10th, 2025

In 1980, Newsweek pub­lished a can­tan­ker­ous and sad­ly on-the-nose diag­no­sis of the Unit­ed States’ “cult of igno­rance” — writ­ten by one Isaac Asi­mov, “pro­fes­sor of bio­chem­istry at Boston Uni­ver­si­ty School of Med­i­cine” and “author of 212 books, most of them on var­i­ous sci­en­tif­ic sub­jects for the gen­er­al pub­lic.” Giv­en this intim­i­dat­ing biog­ra­phy, and the fact that Asi­mov believed that “hard­ly any­one can read” in the U.S., we might expect the sci­ence fic­tion leg­end want­ed noth­ing to do with tele­vi­sion. We would be wrong.

Asi­mov seemed to love TV. In 1987, for exam­ple, the four-time Hugo win­ner wrote a humor­ous­ly crit­i­cal take­down of ALF for TV Guide. And he was a con­sum­mate TV enter­tain­er, mak­ing his first major TV appear­ance on John­ny Carson’s Tonight Show in 1968, appear­ing four times on The Mike Dou­glas Show in the next few years, and giv­ing his final tele­vi­sion inter­views to Dick Cavett in a two-part series in 1989. The same year he wrote about America’s cult of igno­rance, he appeared on The David Let­ter­man show to crack wise with the biggest wiseass on TV. Asi­mov held his own and then some.

“Asi­mov, six­ty in this video, proves him­self a nat­ur­al come­di­an,” writes the Melville House blog; “Let­ter­man, thir­ty-three, can bare­ly keep up.” Sure­ly Asimov’s ban­ter had noth­ing to do with The David Let­ter­man Show’s can­cel­la­tion three days lat­er. (Let­ter­man was back on the air for eleven sea­sons two years lat­er.) Their inter­view ranges wide­ly from pop cul­ture (Asi­mov con­fess­es his appre­ci­a­tion for both Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back) to “the future of med­i­cine, space explo­ration, hope for mankind, and much more,” Vic Sage writes at Pop Cul­ture Retro­ra­ma.

Asimov’s dry deliv­ery — honed dur­ing his Eng­lish-and-Yid­dish-speak­ing Brook­lyn child­hood — is delight­ful. But the writer, teacher, and sci­en­tist hasn’t only come on TV to crack jokes, pro­mote a book, and flaunt his mut­ton­chops. He wants to edu­cate his fel­low Amer­i­cans about the state of the future. (His Newsweek bio was out­dat­ed. As Let­ter­man says, his appear­ance marked the pub­li­ca­tion of his 221st book.) Like Hari Sel­don, the hero of his 1951 nov­el Foun­da­tion, Asi­mov felt con­fi­dent in his abil­i­ty to pre­dict the course of human progress (or regress, as the case may be).

He also felt con­fi­dent answer­ing ques­tions about what to do with out­er space, and where to “put more men,” as Let­ter­man says. His rec­om­men­da­tion to build “fac­to­ries” may strike us as a banal fore­run­ner of Jeff Bezos’ even more banal plans for office parks in space. Asi­mov boasts of the vision he had of “pock­et com­put­ers” in 1950 — hard­ly a real­i­ty in 1980. Dave com­plains about how com­pli­cat­ed com­put­ers are, and Asi­mov accu­rate­ly pre­dicts that as tech­nol­o­gy catch­es up, they will get sim­pler to use. “But these are lit­tle things,” he says. “I nev­er tried to pre­dict. I just tried to write sto­ries to pay my way through col­lege.” He must have paid it sev­er­al times over, and he seemed to get more right than he got wrong. See more of Asi­mov’s pre­dic­tions in the links below.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2021.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts the Future of Civilization–and Rec­om­mends Ways to Ensure That It Sur­vives (1978)

In 1964, Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like Today: Self-Dri­ving Cars, Video Calls, Fake Meats & More

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts in 1983 What the World Will Look Like in 2019: Com­put­er­i­za­tion, Glob­al Co-oper­a­tion, Leisure Time & Moon Min­ing

Isaac Asi­mov Laments the “Cult of Igno­rance” in the Unit­ed States (1980)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

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Inside the Making of the Alien Suit: How H. R. Giger’s Dark Vision Came to Life in Ridley Scott’s Film

in Film, Sci Fi | November 5th, 2025

In the whole of Alien, the tit­u­lar enti­ty only appears on screen for about three min­utes. That’s one rea­son the movie holds up so well against the oth­er crea­ture fea­tures of its era: in glimpses, you nev­er get a chance to reg­is­ter signs of the alien’s being an arti­fi­cial con­struc­tion. That’s not to say it was a shod­dy piece of work; quite the con­trary, as explained in the new video above from Cin­e­maTyler. Its cre­ation demand­ed the ded­i­cat­ed efforts of an inter­na­tion­al group of pro­fes­sion­als includ­ing spe­cial effects artist Car­lo Ram­bal­di, who’d engi­neered the giant ape head in the 1976 King Kong remake and the aliens in Close Encoun­ters of the Third Kind (and would lat­er work on an even more icon­ic extrater­res­tri­al for E.T.).

Charged with design­ing the alien, and even­tu­al­ly with over­see­ing its fab­ri­ca­tion and assem­bly, was the artist H. R. Giger, whose artis­tic sen­si­bil­i­ty occu­pied the inter­sec­tion of organ­ism and machine, Eros and Thanatos. Though it’s most thor­ough­ly expressed in the dead­ly crea­ture that stows away aboard the space tug Nos­tro­mo, it also, to one degree or anoth­er, per­vades the whole movie’s look and feel.

Whether from the late sev­en­ties or any oth­er peri­od, the usu­al sleek, anti­sep­tic sci-fi futures date rather quick­ly, a con­di­tion hard­ly suf­fered by the unre­lieved­ly dark, dank, and dys­func­tion­al set­ting of Alien. This sur­pris­ing­ly grimy real­ism makes the threat of the alien feel that much more real; hid­den in its many shad­ows, Giger’s vision preys that much more effec­tive­ly on our imag­i­na­tion.

Not that it was guar­an­teed to suc­ceed in doing so. As Cin­e­maTyler explains, the process of cre­at­ing the alien came up against count­less set­backs, all under increas­ing­ly severe con­straints of both time and bud­get. At times the pro­duc­tion got lucky, as when it hap­pened upon the near­ly sev­en-foot-tall Bola­ji Bade­jo, who end­ed up wear­ing the alien cos­tume (despite Scot­t’s insis­tence, ear­ly in the pro­duc­tion, that he did­n’t want to make a movie about “a man in a suit”). But it was attempt­ing to cre­ate a being of a kind nev­er seen on screen before, one that had to be devel­oped through tri­al and error, more often the lat­ter than the for­mer. And it was hard­ly the only dif­fi­cult aspect of the mak­ing of Alien, as evi­denced by the eleven-and-count­ing episodes of Cin­e­maTyler’s series on the sub­ject. Maybe in space, no one can hear you scream, but one can eas­i­ly imag­ine the cries of frus­tra­tion let out by Scott, Giger, and all their pres­sured col­lab­o­ra­tors down here on Earth.

Relat­ed Content:

The Giger Bar: Dis­cov­er the 1980s Tokyo Bar Designed by H. R. Giger, the Same Artist Who Cre­at­ed the Night­mar­ish Mon­ster in Rid­ley Scott’s Alien

H. R. Giger’s Dark, Sur­re­al­ist Album Cov­ers: Deb­bie Har­ry, Emer­son, Lake & Palmer, Celtic Frost, Danzig & More

H. R. Giger’s Tarot Cards: The Swiss Artist, Famous for His Design Work on Alien, Takes a Jour­ney into the Occult

Watch Six New Short Alien Films: Cre­at­ed to Cel­e­brate the 40th Anniver­sary of Rid­ley Scott’s Film

High School Kids Stage Alien: The Play, Get Kudos from Rid­ley Scott and Sigour­ney Weaver

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Aldous Huxley to George Orwell: My Hellish Vision of the Future is Better Than Yours (1949)

in Books, Literature, Sci Fi | October 27th, 2025

In 1949, George Orwell received a curi­ous let­ter from his for­mer high school French teacher.

Orwell had just pub­lished his ground­break­ing book Nine­teen Eighty-Four, which received glow­ing reviews from just about every cor­ner of the Eng­lish-speak­ing world. His French teacher, as it hap­pens, was none oth­er than Aldous Hux­ley, who taught at Eton for a spell before writ­ing Brave New World (1931), the oth­er great 20th-cen­tu­ry dystopi­an nov­el.

Hux­ley starts off the let­ter prais­ing the book, describ­ing it as “pro­found­ly impor­tant.” He con­tin­ues, “The phi­los­o­phy of the rul­ing minor­i­ty in Nine­teen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been car­ried to its log­i­cal con­clu­sion by going beyond sex and deny­ing it.”

Then Hux­ley switch­es gears and crit­i­cizes the book, writ­ing, “Whether in actu­al fact the pol­i­cy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indef­i­nite­ly seems doubt­ful. My own belief is that the rul­ing oli­garchy will find less ardu­ous and waste­ful ways of gov­ern­ing and of sat­is­fy­ing its lust for pow­er, and these ways will resem­ble those which I described in Brave New World.” (Lis­ten to him read a dra­ma­tized ver­sion of the book here.)

Basi­cal­ly, while prais­ing Nine­teen Eighty-Four, Hux­ley argues that his ver­sion of the future was more like­ly to come to pass.

In Hux­ley’s seem­ing­ly dystopi­an World State, the elite amuse the mass­es into sub­mis­sion with a mind-numb­ing drug called Soma and an end­less buf­fet of casu­al sex. Orwell’s Ocea­nia, on the oth­er hand, keeps the mass­es in check with fear thanks to an end­less war and a hyper-com­pe­tent sur­veil­lance state. At first blush, they might seem like they are dia­met­ri­cal­ly opposed but, in fact, an Orwellian world and a Hux­leyan one are sim­ply two dif­fer­ent modes of oppres­sion.

While we haven’t quite arrived at either dystopi­an vision, the pow­er of both books is that they tap into our fears of the state. While Hux­ley might make you look askance at The Bach­e­lor or Face­book, Orwell makes you recoil in hor­ror at the gov­ern­ment throw­ing around phras­es like “enhanced inter­ro­ga­tion” and “sur­gi­cal drone strikes.”

You can read Huxley’s full let­ter below.

Wright­wood. Cal.

21 Octo­ber, 1949

Dear Mr. Orwell,

It was very kind of you to tell your pub­lish­ers to send me a copy of your book. It arrived as I was in the midst of a piece of work that required much read­ing and con­sult­ing of ref­er­ences; and since poor sight makes it nec­es­sary for me to ration my read­ing, I had to wait a long time before being able to embark on Nine­teen Eighty-Four.

Agree­ing with all that the crit­ics have writ­ten of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how pro­found­ly impor­tant the book is. May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals — the ulti­mate rev­o­lu­tion? The first hints of a phi­los­o­phy of the ulti­mate rev­o­lu­tion — the rev­o­lu­tion which lies beyond pol­i­tics and eco­nom­ics, and which aims at total sub­ver­sion of the indi­vid­u­al’s psy­chol­o­gy and phys­i­ol­o­gy — are to be found in the Mar­quis de Sade, who regard­ed him­self as the con­tin­u­a­tor, the con­sum­ma­tor, of Robe­spierre and Babeuf. The phi­los­o­phy of the rul­ing minor­i­ty in Nine­teen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been car­ried to its log­i­cal con­clu­sion by going beyond sex and deny­ing it. Whether in actu­al fact the pol­i­cy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indef­i­nite­ly seems doubt­ful. My own belief is that the rul­ing oli­garchy will find less ardu­ous and waste­ful ways of gov­ern­ing and of sat­is­fy­ing its lust for pow­er, and these ways will resem­ble those which I described in Brave New World. I have had occa­sion recent­ly to look into the his­to­ry of ani­mal mag­net­ism and hyp­no­tism, and have been great­ly struck by the way in which, for a hun­dred and fifty years, the world has refused to take seri­ous cog­nizance of the dis­cov­er­ies of Mes­mer, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest.

Part­ly because of the pre­vail­ing mate­ri­al­ism and part­ly because of pre­vail­ing respectabil­i­ty, nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry philoso­phers and men of sci­ence were not will­ing to inves­ti­gate the odd­er facts of psy­chol­o­gy for prac­ti­cal men, such as politi­cians, sol­diers and police­men, to apply in the field of gov­ern­ment. Thanks to the vol­un­tary igno­rance of our fathers, the advent of the ulti­mate rev­o­lu­tion was delayed for five or six gen­er­a­tions. Anoth­er lucky acci­dent was Freud’s inabil­i­ty to hyp­no­tize suc­cess­ful­ly and his con­se­quent dis­par­age­ment of hyp­no­tism. This delayed the gen­er­al appli­ca­tion of hyp­no­tism to psy­chi­a­try for at least forty years. But now psy­cho-analy­sis is being com­bined with hyp­no­sis; and hyp­no­sis has been made easy and indef­i­nite­ly exten­si­ble through the use of bar­bi­tu­rates, which induce a hyp­noid and sug­gestible state in even the most recal­ci­trant sub­jects.

With­in the next gen­er­a­tion I believe that the world’s rulers will dis­cov­er that infant con­di­tion­ing and nar­co-hyp­no­sis are more effi­cient, as instru­ments of gov­ern­ment, than clubs and pris­ons, and that the lust for pow­er can be just as com­plete­ly sat­is­fied by sug­gest­ing peo­ple into lov­ing their servi­tude as by flog­ging and kick­ing them into obe­di­ence. In oth­er words, I feel that the night­mare of Nine­teen Eighty-Four is des­tined to mod­u­late into the night­mare of a world hav­ing more resem­blance to that which I imag­ined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased effi­cien­cy. Mean­while, of course, there may be a large scale bio­log­i­cal and atom­ic war — in which case we shall have night­mares of oth­er and scarce­ly imag­in­able kinds.

Thank you once again for the book.

Yours sin­cere­ly,

Aldous Hux­ley

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Aldous Hux­ley Nar­rate His Dystopi­an Mas­ter­piece, Brave New World

Aldous Hux­ley Tells Mike Wal­lace What Will Destroy Democ­ra­cy: Over­pop­u­la­tion, Drugs & Insid­i­ous Tech­nol­o­gy (1958)

George Orwell Iden­ti­fies the Main Ene­my of the Free Press: It’s the “Intel­lec­tu­al Cow­ardice” of the Press Itself

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

Aldous Hux­ley to George Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949)

Aldous Huxley’s Most Beau­ti­ful, LSD-Assist­ed Death: A Let­ter from His Wid­ow

Jonathan Crow is a writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions.

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Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like in 2014

in Sci Fi | July 29th, 2025

Image by Rochester Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

When New York City host­ed The World’s Fair in 1964, Isaac Asi­mov, the pro­lif­ic sci-fi author and pro­fes­sor of bio­chem­istry at Boston Uni­ver­si­ty, took the oppor­tu­ni­ty to won­der what the world would look like 50 years hence — assum­ing the world sur­vived the nuclear threats of the Cold War. Writ­ing in The New York Times, Asi­mov imag­ined a world that you might part­ly rec­og­nize today, a world where:

  • “Gad­getry will con­tin­ue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Kitchen units will be devised that will pre­pare ‘automeals,’ heat­ing water and con­vert­ing it to cof­fee; toast­ing bread; fry­ing, poach­ing or scram­bling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on. Break­fasts will be ‘ordered’ the night before to be ready by a spec­i­fied hour the next morn­ing.”
  • “Com­mu­ni­ca­tions will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the per­son you tele­phone. The screen can be used not only to see the peo­ple you call but also for study­ing doc­u­ments and pho­tographs and read­ing pas­sages from books. Syn­chro­nous satel­lites, hov­er­ing in space will make it pos­si­ble for you to direct-dial any spot on earth, includ­ing the weath­er sta­tions in Antarc­ti­ca.”
  • “[M]en will con­tin­ue to with­draw from nature in order to cre­ate an envi­ron­ment that will suit them bet­ter. By 2014, elec­tro­lu­mi­nes­cent pan­els will be in com­mon use. Ceil­ings and walls will glow soft­ly, and in a vari­ety of col­ors that will change at the touch of a push but­ton.”
  • “Robots will nei­ther be com­mon nor very good in 2014, but they will be in exis­tence.”
  • “The appli­ances of 2014 will have no elec­tric cords, of course, for they will be pow­ered by long-lived bat­ter­ies run­ning on radioiso­topes.”
  • “[H]ighways … in the more advanced sec­tions of the world will have passed their peak in 2014; there will be increas­ing empha­sis on trans­porta­tion that makes the least pos­si­ble con­tact with the sur­face. There will be air­craft, of course, but even ground trav­el will increas­ing­ly take to the air a foot or two off the ground.”
  • “[V]ehicles with ‘Robot-brains’ … can be set for par­tic­u­lar des­ti­na­tions … that will then pro­ceed there with­out inter­fer­ence by the slow reflex­es of a human dri­ver.”
  • “[W]all screens will have replaced the ordi­nary set; but trans­par­ent cubes will be mak­ing their appear­ance in which three-dimen­sion­al view­ing will be pos­si­ble.”
  • “[T]he world pop­u­la­tion will be 6,500,000,000 and the pop­u­la­tion of the Unit­ed States will be 350,000,000.” And lat­er he warns that if the pop­u­la­tion growth con­tin­ues unchecked, “All earth will be a sin­gle choked Man­hat­tan by A.D. 2450 and soci­ety will col­lapse long before that!” As a result, “There will, there­fore, be a world­wide pro­pa­gan­da dri­ve in favor of birth con­trol by ratio­nal and humane meth­ods and, by 2014, it will undoubt­ed­ly have tak­en seri­ous effect.” [See our Walt Dis­ney Fam­i­ly Plan­ning car­toon from ear­li­er this week.]
  • “Ordi­nary agri­cul­ture will keep up with great dif­fi­cul­ty and there will be ‘farms’ turn­ing to the more effi­cient micro-organ­isms. Processed yeast and algae prod­ucts will be avail­able in a vari­ety of fla­vors.”
  • “The world of A.D. 2014 will have few rou­tine jobs that can­not be done bet­ter by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will there­fore have become large­ly a race of machine ten­ders. Schools will have to be ori­ent­ed in this direc­tion.… All the high-school stu­dents will be taught the fun­da­men­tals of com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy will become pro­fi­cient in bina­ry arith­metic and will be trained to per­fec­tion in the use of the com­put­er lan­guages that will have devel­oped out of those like the con­tem­po­rary “For­tran.”
  • “[M]ankind will suf­fer bad­ly from the dis­ease of bore­dom, a dis­ease spread­ing more wide­ly each year and grow­ing in inten­si­ty. This will have seri­ous men­tal, emo­tion­al and soci­o­log­i­cal con­se­quences, and I dare say that psy­chi­a­try will be far and away the most impor­tant med­ical spe­cial­ty in 2014.”
  •  “[T]he most glo­ri­ous sin­gle word in the vocab­u­lary will have become work!” in our “a soci­ety of enforced leisure.”

Isaac Asi­mov was­n’t the only per­son dur­ing the 60s who peered into the future in a fair­ly pre­scient way. You can find a few more on-the-mark pre­dic­tions from con­tem­po­raries below:

Sci-Fi Writer Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Future in 1964

Mar­shall McLuhan Pre­dicts That Elec­tron­ic Media Will Dis­place the Book & Cre­ate Sweep­ing Changes in Our Every­day Lives (1960)

Wal­ter Cronkite Imag­ines the Home of the 21st Cen­tu­ry … Back in 1967

The Inter­net Imag­ined in 1969

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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