Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles

Book excerpt: Examining representations of cars and bicycles in American science fiction from the late nineteenth century to the present day, Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles argues that science fiction by and large perceives the car as anything but a marvelous invention of modernity. Rather, the genre often scorns and ridicules the automobile and instead promotes more sustainable, more benign, more restrained technologies of movement such as the bicycle.