Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles

Given the extensive influence ofthe 'transport revolution' on the past two centuries (a time when trains,trams, omnibuses, bicycles, cars, airplanes, and so forth were invented), andgiven science fiction’s overall obsession with machines and technologies of allkinds, it is surprising that scholars have not paid more attention to transportationin this increasingly popular genre. Futuristic Cars and Space Bicyclesis the first book to examine the history of representations of road transportmachines in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century American sciencefiction. The focus of this study is on two machines of the road that have been locked in a constant, often bitter, struggle with one another: theautomobile and the bicycle. With chapters ranging from the earlyscience fiction of the pulp magazine era in the 1920s and 1930s, to the postcyberpunk of the 1990s and more recent media of the 2000ssuch as web television, zines, and comics, this book argues that sciencefiction by and large perceives the car as anything but a marvelous invention ofmodernity. Rather, the genre often scorns and ridicules the automobile andinstead promotes more sustainable, more benign, more restrainedtechnologies of movement such as the bicycle.