Introduction
As a former employee of one of those massive "think tanks" which conducts secret studies into all areas of American life, I am familiar with the literary genre known as the
scenario. The latter is actually the use of fictional techniques to predict the future. In other words, the author of a scenario must create a series of characters and then a series of events and then join them in a logical manner to give a picture of the future.
Professor Diray, the author of these scenarios, is a master craftsman. He has provided us with a peek into the future technology of this country and the world that is without peer since the work of Jules Verne. But Professor Diray was not satisfied to portray merely the turbines, plans and "hardware" which make up a technology. On the contrary, he has shown how that technology of the future will be harnessed to man's most enduring passions those concerned with the erotic nature of the soul.
His vision of the twenty-first century is optimistic but not Utopian. Many of the problems which plague us, war, pollution, social unrest, will be gone, but in their places arise new and sometimes more profound problems; ones that deal with the destiny of the universe rather than man alone.
The reader will enter a world that is in many respects alien to him. Many of the personal erotic functions will have been replaced by computer technology. The scope of Professor Diray's imagination and technical competence is truly encyclopedic. In his scenario on the bizarre developments of masturbatory impulses he exhibits a profound knowledge of electronics. In his scenario on the "peace and freedom drug" he shows us his deep grasp of Psychopharmacology. In his scenario on "four dimensional sexual cinema" he gives us the benefit of his obviously deep study of the cinema of this century and the aesthetic experience.
Although many of the scenarios seem to boggle the imagination, there is no doubt that they will be technically feasible in the twenty-first century.
I have reason to believe that the name "O. M. Diray" is a pseudonym for a famous scientist who is afraid that the accent on erotic materials in these scenarios would hurt his academic and professional career if it was revealed that he was the author.
If this is so then it is a sad commentary on those "think tanks" which employ some of America's most important and most brilliant scientists. I will go even further than that and say that one of the reasons for our disgraceful lack of knowledge of the sexual appetites, almost primitive in comparison to even such new areas as laser technology, is due to the reticence of scientists to deal with these matters. But this is another story and has little to do with the technology of the twenty-first century.
There is one last point I would like to make. Although these scenarios are exciting to read, similar in form to imaginative short stories, it would pay the reader to look over them a second time in order to extract the most important details which may have lost as the reader became engrossed in the often startling descriptions. In other words, I am saying that each scenario has to be read twice; once for sheer enjoyment and the second time for the remarkable facts contained therein.
All in all, it is one of the most important books of this or any other decade.
John V. Ception, Ph. D.