After Shave After Time

It is quite possible that I have mentioned this before. Many things get mentioned in these pages over time. Perhaps a little reprise before heading off into newer pastures.

An awful lot of years ago, when I was just a small person (known in polite circles as a child), we used to take a bath every week whether we needed it or not. It was the custom, a tradition of the times.

Nowadays, of course, we have shower units in the house and so a daily—or even a twice daily, shower bath is the order of the day.

When it came to the daily wash or the weekly soak in the tub we would lave ourselves industrially with perfumed soap.

Perfumed. Yes. We had ‘Wright’s Coal Tar’ soap and ‘Pears’ soap—that was the one you could almost see through. Smelt good.

After using either of these you would emerge from thetoilette fresh as a daisy and smelling good. Well, clean, perhaps, if not actually ‘good’!

The alternatives were limited. We had ‘Ocean Spray’ scent, or some sort of conifer based perfumed soap like ‘Pine Forest’ that smelt vaguely like the resin from a fir tree. Some expensive soaps were scented with camphor wood or a similarly exotic product.

Our ‘cheap’ ones were ‘Rose’ or ‘Devon Violets’; slightly up-market would be ‘Lavender’ or ‘Musk’.

Gentleman’s scents were not readily identifiable as anything specific but we would all wash in flowers or pine trees of some sort.

Today I had a shower. Not remarkable, really, except that I cleansed myself with ‘Honey and Goat’s Milk’. I could have had one of sundry fruits like ‘Apple’, ‘Strawberry’, ‘Melon’ in which case I should have been delayed in my ablutions because my brain would almost certainly have been mired in a decision making process—wash with it or eat it?

When did we move from cleaning ourselves with flowers, trees and ocean scents to using food?

At what point did the soap makers decide that we needed to lather ourselves in cider?

At what point does it stop? Are we heading for ‘Fruit Cocktail’ shampoos or, perhaps, a medley of ‘Raspberry, Strawberry and Peach Yoghurt’ shower gel?

Yes, ‘Peach’. Mine ran out the other day I am deliriously excited to inform you.

My point is, what is next? Where do we go in the future for yet greater excitement in the bathroom?

I hesitate to mention ‘Dogs**t Aftershave’ lest some manufacturer reads this and cries, “Eureka! The wave of the future!” taking me at my word in the process.

But, seriously, where next?

The thought that occurs to me is that with the gradual depletion of our stocks of hydrocarbons, diesel fuel may become the new ‘Chanel No.5’.

We could lather ourselves with the “Refreshing Aroma of ‘Lead Free Gasoline’!” Our shampoo might be redolent with that good old-fashioned scent of ‘Brent Crude—a light way to start your day.’

Tar. We did have ‘Wright’s Coal Tar’ soap. That could make a comeback. Perhaps there might be a delicate miasma of naphtha wafting around our bathrooms when oil out-prices gold on the Stock Exchanges floors.

My son thinks that shampooing in ‘Fruits of the Forest Aroma Therapy’ is normal, what will he think in the future? As I do? That not all changes are for the best?

We sci-fi writers tend not to think too much about the personal habits of our characters but what if we did? Perhaps we should think more about personal hygiene in the future and the scents that surround our heroes and villains.

I wonder what the ‘Hulk’ smells like?

Einstein and Asimov

Don't you love the supreme confidence of the man?

Einstein's theory was first—and dramatically—confirmed during a solar eclipse within four years of its publication, making him an instant celebrity. When asked how he would have felt if he had been proven wrong, Einstein replied: "I would have felt sorry for the Lord. The theory is correct."

The World lost a great mind when he died, one wonders what could have been achieved, scientifically, had he lived on.

Not possible, of course. Yet in some ways he does live on. There are other great minds that have taken up the reins of his thinking.

People like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson and not to forget Stephen Hawkinge, of course.

There are hundreds of people out there working on scientific ideas and principles who are, like Einstein, not hidebound by tradition or bogged down in the quagmire of ‘accepted wisdom’.

It is such people as these that we look up to in order to transform our humdrum lives into a hotbed of excitement such as we can only currently imagine. Perhaps we cannot imagine but there are equally great minds out there who can imagine for us.

I am thinking of the late Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke being just two examples of those people who see things in our future that pass other people by.

Asimov imagined worlds where a man called Hari Sheldon would be able to predict the future by using social mathematics; he modelled human behaviour into a predictable, mathematical sequence of circumstances.

Imagining such a thing is only a step away from doing it. Nothing starts without an idea, an initial premise.

Clarke had a computer called HAL. It defied a human, “I’m sorry, David. I cannot do that,” it told the spaceman.

We already ‘talk’ to computers and we even have speech recognition on telephones. How long will it be before our telephone says, “I’m sorry, I cannot do that,” to us?

When Asimov and Clarke wrote these stories there was little in the way of computing as we know it. Their minds and Robert A Heinlein, Kurt Vonnegut, Carl Sagan, et al, were projected into what they imagined our future to be.

We can visit that future—their future, by reading their books. We can brighten our lives by soaking up their words and turning that text into vivid images in our heads.

Newer generations of authors have more to ‘feed’ on. They are more accustomed to new ideas, new technologies, than us older writers so that they can develop more intense ideas of what might be based on those technologies.

Not only what we might refer to as ‘Standard Sci-Fi’ but also works in the genre of ‘steam punk’ might also grasp the modern technology nettle in their modelling of the future in the way that Rudyard Kipling did in his ‘steam punk’ story about airships (‘With the Night Mail’ in 1905 and ‘As Easy as A.B.C.’ in 1912). Kipling had less to go on in terms of flight than we did but still made an excellent fist of those stories.

[Sci-Fi is far from new!]

Einstein was brilliant. There is no doubt of that. He is the man who wrote down the future as a fact.

Equally brilliant, to me, are those who write down the future as possibilities.