I have been watching the SyFy channel during the holidays for some reason. One of the things that is obvious is the apocalyptic nature of so much science fiction today. It’s all about the end of the world as we know it with either invasions or self-destruction. Being 65 I started thinking about what science fiction was like when I was growing up. It was NOT apocalyptic at all. It was futurist and optimistic – even a bit naïve.

However I much prefer that to the unending stream of dark and violent special effects. Even someone as sophisticated and innovative as Peter Thiel one of the founders of PayPal and earliest investors in Facebook has lamented that America “the country that invented the modern assembly line the skyscraper the airplane and the personal computer has lost its belief in the future.” In a recent interview in the New Yorker George Packer writes that Thiel “thinks that Americans who are beguiled by mere gadgetry have forgotten how expansive technological change can be. He looks back to the fifties and sixties the heyday of popularized science and technology in this country as a time when visions of a radically different future were commonplace. Thiel’s venture-capital firm Founders Fund has an online manifesto about the future that begins with the complaint: “We wanted flying cars instead we got 140 characters.” As he puts it “You have dizzying change where there’s no progress.”

So…I indulge myself in joining Scientific American in celebrating 100 years of Tom Swift (www.tomswift.info) and his impact on at least two generations of us who looked forward to good things we could only imagine. As the original dust jacket reads “It is the purpose of these spirited tales to convey in a realistic way the wonderful advances in land and sea locomotion and to interest the boy of the present in the hope that he may be a factor in aiding the marvelous development that is coming in the future.”

Here’s to flying cars megascopes jetmarines electronic hydrolungs and the triphibian atomicar.