Where’s my jetpack got to? And other sci-fi tech queries

There is a game some people like to play when thinking about the future. Call it “Where’s my jetpack?” We pore over science fiction from years past (often the years when we were impressionable kids) and ask: “Why didn’t we get all the cool stuff we were promised?” Sure, we got videophones, pocket-sized computers and robots on Mars, not to mention genetically engineered bunnies that glow in the dark. But what about jetpacks? And flying cars?

It is always something. That one image or idea that became synonymous with “the future”, but now lives in the ashtray of history. And yet people will cling to it, trying to make jetpacks happen because the idea still seems, frankly, pretty cool.

When I play Where’s my jetpack, however, I don’t ask about what happened to all those gadgets. Instead, I ask: “Where are the social revolutions I was promised when I was a kid?”

For me, that will always be the 20th-century idea of a revolution in gender equality. Audiences devoured stories about how the men and women of tomorrow would be swapping gender roles in completely unexpected ways. But now that vision of freedom seems as retro as Flash Gordon.

I recently discussed this with a group of writers on a panel about retro-futurism at science fiction convention WorldCon. Since then, I have been pondering the power of ideas from history about the future.

Science fiction authors dreamed of women’s equality at least as far back as 1915, when Charlotte Perkins Gilman published the novel Herland. In it, a group of male adventurers discover a country ruled by women, who live in a utopian society that bears some resemblance to Wonder Woman’s beloved Themiscyra.

Much later in the century, in 1974, the cult classic movie Zardoz imagined a distant future of free love, where men could marry each other. Anyone who has seen this wild movie will never forget Sean Connery donning a lacy wedding gown to marry a man in a high-tech hippie ceremony.

Women now have the vote in most countries, and men can marry each other in many places, too. But other cultural revolutions exist in the same wishful limbo as the jetpack.

Consider, for instance, male pregnancy. No, really. You would be surprised how often this trope comes up in science fiction.

Perhaps most famously, it is the plot of 1994 science fiction comedy Junior, where we learn that truly advanced science has allowed the world’s most famous action movie hero, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to get pregnant and give birth.

But this idea is also floated in the classic 1970s feminist novel Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy, where children are incubated in artificial wombs and people of all genders can breastfeed them.

My personal favourite is the genuinely excellent 1985 war movie Enemy Mine, about an improbable, interstellar, interspecies friendship between a pregnant male alien and a regular old human bro after they crash-land on an inhospitable planet.

Just as jetpacks are ubiquitous in science fiction of a certain era, so, too, is male pregnancy. Those novels weren’t entirely wrong. We do indeed have pregnant men (there are plenty of documented examples), and there are DIY jetpack enthusiasts, too. But neither group is as widespread as pop culture led us to believe they would be.

So why were so many fantasies about male pregnancy birthed in the late 20th century?

Partly it was the result of the sexual revolution, which inspired people to question their traditional ideas about sex and families. If women could achieve equality in the male-dominated workplace, after all, why shouldn’t men achieve equality in the realm of motherhood?

Then along came the unmistakable influence of the LGBTQ+ rights movements. As the century ended, the idea of a “chosen family” had hit the mainstream, and science fiction authors were speculating about families with two dads, three mums, or four robots and an octopus.

And why not? As long as the kids have a happy, stable environment, who cares if dad is the one who gets pregnant?

Back in the 1990s, Schwarzenegger allowed men to dream that they could experience the miracle of bearing a child.

But in 2025, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order stating that there are only two genders, and that they are immutable. Whatever was scribbled on your birth certificate is your inescapable destiny. Women get pregnant and men don’t.

It doesn’t matter what they say. You might still be waiting for your jetpacks. I’m still waiting for my pregnant men.