Where is my jetpack? And other technological science fiction requests

There is a game that some people like to play while thinking in the future. Call that “where is my jetpack?” We have deepened science fiction for the past years (often the years when we were impressable children) and ask: “Why did we not get all the nice things that were promised to us?” Of course, we have obtained videophones, pocket computers and robots on Mars, not to mention the genetically modified rabbits that shine in darkness. But what about jetpacks? And flying cars?

It’s always something. This image or an idea which has become synonymous with “the future”, but now lives in the ashtray of history. And yet, people will hang on, trying to make the jetpacks occur because the idea still seems, frankly, quite cool.

When I play where my jetpack is, however, I do not ask what happened to all these gadgets. Instead, I ask: “Where are the social revolutions that were promised to me when I was a child?”

For me, it will always be the idea of ​​the 20th century of a revolution in gender equality. The public devoured stories about how the men and women of tomorrow would exchange gender roles in a completely unexpected way. But now, this vision of freedom seems as retro as Flash Gordon.

I recently discussed this with a group of writers on a panel on retro-futurism at Science Fiction Convention WorldCon. Since then, I have been thinking about the power of the ideas of history on the future.

The authors of science fiction dreamed of the equality of women at least as far as 1915, when Charlotte Perkins Gilman published the novel Herland. In this document, a group of male adventurers discovers a country led by women, who live in a utopian society that resembles the Wonder Woman theme.

Much later in the century, in 1974, the classic cult film Zardoz Imagined a distant future of free love, where men could marry each other. Anyone who saw this wild film will never forget Sean Connery putting on a lace wedding dress to marry a man in a high -tech hippie ceremony.

Women now have the vote in most countries, and men can also get married in many places. But other cultural revolutions exist in the same wishes as the Jetpack.

Consider, for example, male pregnancy. No, really. You would be surprised to see how often this trope appears in science fiction.

Perhaps the most famous is the intrigue of the 1994 science fiction comedy JuniorWhere we learn that really advanced science has enabled the hero of the most famous action film in the world, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to get pregnant and to give birth.

But this idea is also floated in the classic feminist novel of the 1970s Woman on time By margin piercy, where children are incubated in artificial uterus and people of all sex can breastfeed them.

My favorite is the really excellent war film of 1985 EnemyAbout an improbable and interstellar friendship, interspecific between a pregnant male foreigner and a regular old human brother after their collision on an inhospitable planet.

Just as jetpacks are omnipresent in science fiction of a certain era, there is also a male pregnancy. These novels were not entirely false. We have pregnant men (there are a lot of documented examples), and there are also jetpack DIY lovers. But neither of the two groups is as widespread as pop culture led us to believe that they would be.

So why were so many fantasies about male pregnancy was born at the end of the 20th century?

It was partly the result of the sexual revolution, which inspired people to question their traditional ideas about sex and families. If women could reach equality in the workplace dominated by men, after all, why should men not reach equality in the field of maternity?

Then came the undoubted influence of LGBTQ +rights movements. At the end of the century, the idea of ​​a “chosen family” had struck the dominant current, and the science fiction authors speculated on families with two dads, three mothers or four robots and a octopus.

And why not? As long as children have a happy and stable environment, who cares if daddy is the one who gets pregnant?

In the 1990s, Schwarzenegger allowed men to dream that they could feel the miracle to wear a child.

But in 2025, American president Donald Trump published a decree indicating that there are only two sexes and that they are immutable. Anything that has been scribbled on your birth certificate is your unmissable destiny. Women get pregnant and men do not.

No matter what they say. You could still wait for your jetpacks. I’m still waiting for my pregnant men.