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Alongside Astor's kind of optimism, the Socialist critique of society and the era's muckraking passions continued, contributing darker shades to images of the future. In 1903 William Wallace Cook, a newspaperman and free-lance writer, published A Round Trip to the Year 2000, in which robots known as "muglugs" displace human workers, sending them to live out a miserable existence somewhere in the Midwest (a vision not designed to cheer chambers of commerce in the heartland). Voracious capitalism has triumphed. The "Air Trust" sells the very air people breathe; the "Sun Trust" forces the public to pay even for sunshine.
World War I, with its machines that dealt death rather than hope, further darkened the view of things to come. In 1927 the famous German moviemaker Fritz Lang released Metropolis, the idea for which came to him when he first saw, from shipboard, the glaring lights and tall buildings of Manhattan. (The film became a favorite of Hitler's.) Set in the year 2000, Metropolis shows plutocrats living in idle pleasure while workers slave away underground until a spectacular rebellion sets them free. This was reminiscent of H.G. Wells' 1895 dystopian fantasy, The Time Machine, in which a subhuman race called the Morlocks lives underground and emerges to devour the humans who live above.
In the meantime, what was not yet known as the media had enthusiastically taken up the science-fiction approach to the future. In 1910 an illustrator named Jean Marc Cote began a series of advertising cards depicting life in the year 2000: underwater croquet tournaments, men being shaved by robots, battery-powered roller skates. Later, Hugo Gernsback, who started out as a manufacturer of automotive batteries, launched the magazine Amazing Stories ("Extravagant Fiction Today--Cold Fact Tomorrow"). It was endlessly imitated. A typical series in Famous Fantastic Mysteries was titled Crimes of the Year 2000. The crimes were not especially novel, but some of the crime-fighting devices were, for the time: tiny recorders strapped to the wrist, heli-pursuit cars, bloodhound machines that identified a perpetrator's smell. The pulp view of the millennium was dominated by gadgetry. If there was a philosophical outlook, it was patriotic and upbeat in the sense that the good guys always won.
In the next significant--and much less entertaining--phase of futurology, the year 2000 was taken over by the think tanks. Most notably there was the Academy of Arts and Sciences Commission on the Year 2000, set up in 1966 (rather rushing things). It was headed by the distinguished sociologist Daniel Bell and included 42 leading thinkers in fields ranging from science to mysticism. One of the commission's prominent members was that brilliant man-mountain Herman Kahn, who published The Year 2000 alongside the commission's report, Toward the Year 2000.