Dated Futures, by Charles Stross

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Berlin in the summer oscillates wildly between thirty degree heat and wind driving the rain horizontally across broad road and exposed platz alike. It's like Germany, but different: comfortably lived-in, extensively graffiti'd but basically tidy and sane, except for the football thing.

(We arrived near the climax of the European Cup, right after the semi-final that saw Germany trounce Turkey and go into the final against Spain. And the place went wild. Convoys of flag-flying cars and bikes honking their horns, crowds on foot shouting up and down the Ku'damm ... it's a potentially explosive mixture, and in England it would have ended in a riot, but in Berlin they just drank the bars dry and went home.)

I was there on vacation, so I'm short of publishing-related anecdotes to share with you. But it's hard to switch off the authorial observation engine (that keeps making notes and filing them away for future use), and Berlin gives you plenty of fodder for fiction. You can focus single-mindedly on relaxation and still find it impossible to ignore the urgent visions of a bygone century's futurism. Berlin is modern, by the standards of European capitals; it only really got going in the late 19th century, as the hub of a new empire obsessed with progress and competition. It's littered with the spoor of stale futurism, from the bizarre impaled geodesic dome of the Fernsehturm to the Bauhaus - archive. This is the country which brought us Vorsprung Durch Technik as a marketing slogan, where engineers list their PhD's before their names as an honorific, and the futures are never far below the surface.

Futures?

Well, yes: every decade has its own vision of the future, and Berlin has been around long enough that they're stacked up in layers on top of one another. Futures come and go, and yesterday's futures look curiously dated, like Werner von Braun's vision of a lunar expedition from 1952 contrasted with the gritty realities of the Apollo program.

Today's futuristic engineering program is tomorrow's quaint throwback.

And the present finds new and astonishing uses for yesterday's left-over futures.

I spend a pleasantly mindless day in the belly of one such repurposed ghost future, sunbathing and swimming in a tropical lagoon inside a zeppelin hangar.

About fifty miles east of Berlin, in the middle of a former East German military airfield near Brand, a huge silvery dome bulges at the sky. Built to house the CargoLifter freight airship in the late 1990s, the zeppelin hangar is enormous -- a third of a kilometer long, high enough to house the Statue of Liberty.

Zeppelins have always been an icon of futurism, and it's hard to get more futuristic than a giant freight airship with twice the lift of the Hindenburg. CargoLifter ran out of money in 2002, but a consortium of far eastern resort operators bought it and converted it into a tourist attraction that could itself be a harbinger of things to come.

Tropical Islands is every cheesy beach resort activity you can imagine, sanitized and repackaged for a peak oil future. It caters to day-trippers and holiday-makers from Berlin who don't want or can't afford to spend hours in a 747 to get to their rain forest paradise; why fly (expensively, with oil at $140 a barrel) when you can get there in an hour by commuter train?

The statistics associated with Tropical Islands are outrageous -- it's a major futurist endeavor in its own right, an attempt to transport a slice of the Pacific rim to the plains of eastern Germany. It's got the world's largest tropical indoor pool, the world's largest single hall with no supporting pillars, the largest indoor water park: it's fully twice the volume of NASA's Vertical Assembly Building (where the Apollo and Shuttle stacks are assembled) -- the list seems endless.

As tropical resorts go, it's a technological masterpiece, a triumph of the packaged entertainment industry. But it's built on the bones of an earlier future. Encountering it is like running across a Space Shuttle external tank re-purposed as a municipal water tower, or a decommissioned nuclear power station's turbine hall as an art gallery -- an outrageous slap in the face for yesterday's futurism, simultaneously profoundly disrespectful in its rejection of the original purpose of the artefact, but cheerily optimistic in its conviction that, however misplaced the original vision of tomorrow was, we can still find a new use for its left-overs.

And so, I'm fleeing to Berlin. (About which, more later ...)

Charles Stross, Saturn's Children, android, future, femmebot, science fiction, Penguin Books, books