Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Backpack Alarm book, last picture

"Hello Future!"
That's the title for this page. The text is actually about how in the future people and things may all have chips imbedded in them that tell who you are, and you may not need to carry money or a key.
Seth has chosen instead to illustrate a child's toy image of what the future might look like, with a grinning space craft exiting the earth, and, in the inset, a boy with a similar grin, wearing a helmet made out of what looks like a colander with a little pencil eraser sticking out of the top as an antenna. You can picture little electricity lines coming out of his antenna, and going "bzzz!" Seth could have done a realistic sort of astronaut in his Michelin Man suit and bubble helmet but his drawing has much more charm, don't you think?

I started to write that Seth's picture was of a 1950's style image of what an astronaut might look like, but looking for a picture to support that, I found a great blog called Paleo-Future, full of predictions about the Future from old magazines and other popular media. A little research there showed that in the 50's in general they had a much better idea of what space travel might actually look like than I would have thought. I mention it here only because the blog is something that I think Seth would have gotten a huge kick from. It's definitely worth a visit.

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