Friday, July 05, 2019

Tomorrow Calling (video 1993) Review

Did you know that there is an extant film of William Gibson's Gernsback Continuum, one of his standout early stories?

It's Tomorrow Calling, directed by Tim Leandro, from 1993.



It's a bit literal-minded, except for the completely unexpected Blackpool, UK location.  The short is about the past's conception of the future - Hugo Gernsback-era airships and food pills. A quarter century after the shoot, and forty years after the story was published, I found myself tied up with yesterday's ideas about last week's ideas about their future which is now our past and never happened, instead of yesterday's ideas about their future which is now our present.

For example, the use today's (1993) technology of nowadays almost unavailably outmoded VHS tapes to cure yourself of the future - and their contents, pornography, which now has much more feminist sociology attached now than it did then - overshadows whatever the hell it was supposed to say about the future back in those days.

The Guardian looks at yesterday's futures here: Yesterday’s tomorrow today: what we can learn from past urban visions


The movie is only 11 minutes long and definitely worth a watch.

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