Elon Musk's future is out of date

'Kim Stanley Robinson, whose Mars trilogy helped inspire some of the recent interest in colonizing the red planet, has called Musk’s plan “the 1920s science-fiction cliché of the boy who builds a rocket to the moon in his backyard” and one that’s dangerously distracting us from the real problems we face here on Earth.' - Paris Marx, 'Elon Musk is convinced he's the future: we need to look beyond him'

'Ark of Space' is an illustration by the Japanese artist Shigeru Komatsuzaki. Komatsuzaki, who died in 2001, was a prolific artist who did paintings for model kit boxes and magazine covers. You can see a selection of his work at Pink Tentacle. I can't tell whether this design was for a model or a magazine, though I have managed to find a version of the picture with text on it, in the retrofuturism subreddit, which leads me to suspect it's a magazine cover. 

So far, then, Elon Musk is trying to sell us a future which is 54 years out of date. But there's more! Because it seems Komatsuzaki is inspired by an earlier source in making his illustration. That source? The cover of the November 1939 edition of pulp sci-fi magazine Startling Stories: 

The rocketship might be a little more Flash Gordon than Thunderbird 1, but the 1939 illustration - credited, by pulp scribe Jack Williamson, to artist Howard V. Brown - is in the right place, as are the procession of paired animals (with giraffes and elephants centre stage) and the uniformed guards forcing back the crowds. It's pretty obvious Komatsuzaki used Brown's cover as a template for his more detailed version. Indeed, it's possible he was illustrating the Japanese republication of Williamson's 'The Fortress of Utopia', the eighteenth chapter of which is indeed called 'The Ark of Space' (you can read the whole issue at the Internet Archive). 

So the Bold New Future Apartheid Clyde is trying to sell us dates back to 1939 - eighty-three years ago. This is one of the things I mean when I talk about the death-grip nostalgia has on contemporary culture: even our ideas of the future are out-of-date. 

Not that Musk has given this any thought. He just nicked the image off TV Tropes. That's how lazy he is.