

How the Victorians Invented the Future - Petiver
http://aeon.co/magazine/society/how-the-victorians-imagined-and-invented-the-future/

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PeterWhittaker
Intriguing article. We are in our time so used to thinking of time as fluid,
of history as dynamic (and generally progressing), that it is difficult for us
to conceive that for much of history both time and history itself were
considered static. If there were changes, they were invariably regression from
some golden age.

 _The Discovery of Time_ [1] provides quite a good introduction both to how we
came to conceive (intellectually and culturally) of time and history as
dynamic and changing and to what it was like to live in a time when time and
history were considered static, unchanging.

What has been seen cannot be unseen, what has been integrated into one's
thoughts and emotions and way of being cannot be removed, but by replacement
or damage. This book does a good job of at least letting us imagine how
shockingly different static time culture truly was.

[1]
[http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo3615904...](http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo3615904.html)

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codeflo
Contrast this article with
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_fiction](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_fiction)

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agumonkey
I love how people looked at electricity as a way to get back to a traditional
life style (no crowded industrial areas) but with new opportunities for work.

