In the IBM commercial playing on the video to the right, Star Trek Deep Space Nine actor Avery Brooks is yelling demanding to know where our flying cars are. We were promised flying cars!

Well we were promised lots of things and not just the usual cities on the moon. Science Fiction from its earliest pulp infancy in the cradle of Hugo Gernsback's fantastic tales was more of an elucidation of fantastic technologies than it was a medium for social criticism or literary achievement. It was in essence, all about the flying cars. And of course the space ships and the robots and the cities on the moon.

Why don't we have any of these things? Well a rational counter-question might be to ask why should we have any of them? Readers of fantasy literature don't wonder why we don't have elves, unicorns and fantasy kingdoms. (Well some of them do, but they're not terribly sane to begin with.) This however isn't a question of delusion. Futuristic fiction often functioned as a kind of out of this world popular mechanics. Hugo Gernsback's magazine didn't just tell you that a spaceship had taken off, it gave you detailed technical specifications for it. Much as Jules Verne described in detail how the trip to the moon was to be managed, so too E.E. "Doc" Smith did in "Skylark of Space" which went into the details of ship construction for Richard Seaton and Martin Crane's ship, its own interstellar travelers.

This remains a commonplace aspect of Science Fiction.While with the era of the New Wave, literate stylization became more of an objective than it had been before, Hard SF, Science Fiction whose goal is itself scientific literacy, remains widely popular, especially among the scientists and engineers who both write and read a good deal of the Science Fiction out there. And that is the essence of Science Fiction. It is an imaginary world that crosses the boundary of imagination by working out the detail of how can and should be feasible. Science Fiction at that juncture becomes real. And so we return to the question, where are the flying cars?

The question of the flying cars points to a key point where reality and fiction breach. Flying cars are of course entirely possible. They've been built and tested. The existence of flying cars is therefore entirely feasible. Science Fiction and generations of writers and illustrators going back to Hugo Gernsback were entirely right about that. But technological feasibility and social feasibility are not the same things.

A flying car is a technologically feasible vehicle, but a flying car is also essentially an airplane. Indeed the flying cars that have been built are essentially airplanes that can drive on the road. A flying car is therefore an airplane and an airplane is a dangerous and difficult vehicle to master. While many people do have pilot's licenses, short of a major program or social turnaround, not even one in a thousand people are likely to have one. This renders the flying car socially impossible.

Then consider the nature of the urban environment. Cities crowded with large populations would accordingly be crowded with large amounts of flying cars. Air traffic controllers currently find it tricky dealing with the number of planes currently in the air. The outcome of having hundreds of thousands of flying cars over New York City right where Avery Brooks is standing, is downright inconceivable. For an urban aerial traffic grid of flying cars to be feasible, what is required is a computerized system of traffic control. Singapore has been deploying one and some American cities have begun slowly experimenting with them. At the point that every vehicle can be reliably wired into a central grid and speeds can be carefully controlled, an urban network of flying cars may indeed become possible. In this scenario the reason the flying cars aren't here is not because of unfeasibility of flying cars, but the unfeasibility of the technology it would take to make them and the environment they operate in, safe.

Safety is a concern rarely on the minds of Science Fiction characters. In Golden Age Science Fiction tales characters may design, build and privately send up ships not caring or worrying very much about what happens to the rest of the planet. In E.E. Smith's Skylark of Space, Richard Seaton and Martin Crane, not to mention DeQuense and United World Steel, play around with the X Compound that combined with copper can all but annihilate the planet, without worrying much about it. By contrast the simpler propellant method of Orion, using nuclear explosions to raise a spaceship, was canceled, simply because it wasn't very safe. With Orion we could cheaply and easily raise up spaceships. It's technologically feasible. Just not socially.

Finally the reason we don't have flying cars is that there is no great need for flying cars. Our cities function on a two dimensional grid, not a three dimensional one. Aside from experiments like the zeppelin dock at the Empire State Building, we use a relatively flat system of roads and streets that take us to a given building, which we then ascend. Even in the tallest cities, the greatest degree of density and thus traffic occurs nearest to the street level. Barring massively scaled multileved cities as in The Fifth Element, flying cars simply don't make sense because we live and work closer to level ground. Granted if we want to jaunt off to China or Paris, we still need a plane. But we also need large amounts of fuel and pilots on call. Even with private airplanes journeys of that scale are still not practical for most for reasons of security, expense and human limitations.

The world of Hugo Gernsback was one where technology was embraced for its wonder and for the way it could transform our lives. In reality technology is embraced primarily for practical short term benefits and profit motives. Cars did dramatically change our landscape and in the process struck a severe blow to our cities, encouraging the suburbanization of America. There is no telling what flying cars might have done.