The Chart Room · books-fiction

Filed by Dana Graviton

In the 1970s, while the real world queued for gasoline and shivered through blackouts, science fiction was busy solving the energy crisis with everything from orbital solar arrays to backyard fusion reactors. This piece looks back at how the decade's boldest fixes lived on the page rather than the grid, and what those fictional shortcuts reveal about the gap between imagination and infrastructure. The solutions were fiction, but the longing behind them was entirely real, and it still shapes how we talk about energy today. It's a reminder that when the present runs out of answers, we tend to hand the problem to the future.