Without me, without you

I'm fairly familiar with the giants of science fiction cinema and literature: Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott, Terry Gilliam, John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, etc. I love reading a good sci-fi book, and I fondly recall reading massive short story compilations that were invariably edited by Asimov and/or Martin H. Greenberg back in the early 90s. But my mind is better wired for visual stimulation, which partly explains why the covers on some of those compilations were more fascinating to me than the stories themselves. This also explains why the last scene from Back to the Future so affected me when I first saw it in the late 80s that all I did for weeks afterward was draw DeLoreans, even during school.

My favorite thing about how "the future" is portrayed in paintings and movies is not how strange or unfamiliar everything looks, but precisely the fact that there are recognizable elements to even the most futuristic scene. For example, I once had a history book written for teens that described what archaeologists have to do in order to appropriately study a long gone civilization. I cannot, for the life of me, recall anything substantial about the book except for a series of paintings in the final chapter that showed how a riverside community in the year 1500 might progress from tents to log cabins to trading outposts to factories to skyscrapers and onward, all in the span of 600 years. The most memorable illustration was the one that depicted the same community in the year 2100, now a gleaming city with neon lights, flying cars, tubular buildings and glass domes. And yet, it was still positioned by the river, and the geography of the place, though much altered from 600 years before, was recognizable. But the book went on to suggest that 500 years after that, if people had abandoned the city, it would just be another archaeological site, overgrown with trees and inhabited by wildlife.

Have you ever wondered what a megalopolis like New York would look like if humans just disappeared? Personally, my thoughts have never been that morbid, but it's fascinating all the same to see a visual interpretation -- an artist's rendering, if you will -- of the notion. Check out this slideshow of images, based on ideas in The World Without Us, a new book that asks what our environment would look like without the impact of humans. And try not to think depressing thoughts.