The 1975–1979 corpus splits cleanly into two imaginative worlds when you point the lens at personal transportation, and the split is more revealing than either world alone. On one side, Gerard O'Neill is designing commuter infrastructure for space habitats with the precision of a transit planner — maglev trains running in vacuum at 300 mph, "commuterspheres" that cost less than a round-trip car ride, vehicles that transfer between rotating cylinders using nothing but angular momentum and require no engine, no fuel, no crew. On the other, Mark Adlard's Multiface imagines a near-future London where electric autos are available for hire by credit card from ticket dispensers, where the vehicles have simplified dashboards and recharge at terminus power points, where a working-class character spends two months studying the driver's manual and is paralyzed by a roundabout map too complex to navigate. Both visions are set in futures that are now our past. One describes transportation that doesn't exist anywhere on Earth in 2025. The other describes something that has essentially arrived — and arrived looking almost exactly as imagined.

Adlard's electric hire-auto system in Multiface [Adlard, Multiface, 1976] is startling in its specificity. Credit card scanning, alphanumeric readers, tiered vehicle options from basic to luxury at proportionally tiered costs, battery recharging at fixed stations, minimal controls — this is recognizably the world of Zipcar, BYD, or a Tesla rental kiosk. The detail that the cheapest option is a rectangular black box without doors, while the most expensive looks like a spaceship on wheels, maps almost perfectly onto the current EV market's aesthetic range. What Adlard didn't anticipate: autonomous navigation. His character Will still has to learn to drive, still gets lost, still needs to punch in coordinates manually. The vehicle warns him with a blinking light when it needs new destination data. The car is electric and hireable, but it is not self-driving.

O'Neill's transportation imagination in The High Frontier [O'Neill, The High Frontier, 1976] went somewhere else entirely — and the gap between his vision and 2025 reality is as informative as Adlard's near-hit. O'Neill was designing for abundance: cheap energy, no petroleum dependence, infrastructure built from scratch without legacy constraints. His "travelsphere" would cost a fifth of a contemporary jet ticket per passenger-mile. His space-habitat commuter vehicles would run on no fuel at all, using only the angular momentum of the cylinder. His vision of personal mobility was genuinely post-scarcity. In 2025, we still have gas stations on every corner, traffic jams, and airline tickets that cost more in real terms than they did in 1976. The physics O'Neill described was correct. The social and economic conditions he assumed never materialized on Earth.

Weizenbaum, writing from a critical rather than utopian position, identified the structural reason: computers were used to optimize the existing automobile system — enabling "an astronomical variety of cars" that "differ only trivially from one another" — rather than to replace it with mass transit [Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 1976]. He framed this as a choice that wasn't really made consciously, a path-dependent lock-in driven by existing capital investment and cultivated consumer appetite. In 2025, that diagnosis looks prescient. We have electric vehicles, yes — but they are still private cars, still individually owned, still requiring parking and roads and insurance. The autonomous vehicle revolution that was supposed to arrive by 2020 is still arriving. The "addictive hunger for private automobiles" Weizenbaum identified has not been broken; it has been electrified.

[Adlard, Multiface, 1976] does the most surprising work in this configuration. Adlard imagined electric vehicle hire as a class-inflected system — the cost of the luxury auto is described in weeks of "increments" (the novel's currency of social credit), making mobility a visible marker of status. This is exactly what has happened: a Tesla Model S and a Nissan Leaf are both EVs, but they signal entirely different social positions. Adlard also gets the infrastructure detail right — recharging at fixed terminus points, not at home — which anticipates the public charging network problem that still bedevils EV adoption in 2025.

[O'Neill, The High Frontier, 1976] contributes the utopian counterpoint. His maglev and commutersphere designs were technically coherent — maglev is real, vacuum tubes are real, the physics of angular momentum transfer is real. What failed to materialize was the context: abundant cheap energy, habitat construction from scratch, a society willing to build transit infrastructure instead of roads. O'Neill's transportation imagination was correct about the technology and wrong about the political economy.

[Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 1976] provides the diagnostic framework. His argument that computers were used to deepen automobile dependence rather than transcend it explains why Adlard's electric hire-car arrived but O'Neill's post-scarcity transit didn't. The computer optimized the existing system; it didn't replace it.

[Clarke, The View from Serendip, 1977] offers a sideways contribution. Clarke's prediction that improved communications would reduce commuting — that "men do much less commuting, much more communicating" — partially came true in 2020–2025 with remote work, but Clarke imagined this would kill cities. Cities are still here. The commute is still here for most workers. Clarke correctly identified the technology (the "comsole" is basically a laptop with video conferencing) but underestimated the social and organizational inertia that keeps people physically moving to work.

The arc across this corpus runs from structural critique (Weizenbaum, early in the window) through utopian redesign (O'Neill, mid-window) to granular near-future extrapolation (Adlard, throughout). What's striking is that the most accurate vision of 2025 personal transportation came from the novelist working at street level, not the physicist designing for space. Adlard's fictional Tcity hire-auto system looks more like 2025 London or San Francisco than O'Neill's Island Three does — because Adlard was extrapolating from existing urban infrastructure, existing class dynamics, existing human reluctance to learn new systems.

The inflection point the corpus couldn't see clearly was autonomy. Every transportation vision here assumes a human driver, a human navigator, a human making decisions about destination. O'Neill's vehicles are computer-controlled in the sense that the habitat computer decides when to release the commutersphere — but once released, physics takes over. Adlard's autos need coordinates punched in; they don't find their own way. The idea that the vehicle itself would navigate, that you would simply get in and say a destination, is absent from the corpus. This is the gap between 1976 and 2025 that the era couldn't quite close — not because the technology was unimaginable, but because the social trust required to hand over navigation to a machine was not yet thinkable.

This configuration is almost entirely male, almost entirely Western, and almost entirely focused on middle-class or above mobility. Adlard's Will is working-class by the novel's standards, and his struggle to afford the hire-auto is the most class-conscious transportation passage in the corpus — but even this is a story about access to a technology, not about the people who build, maintain, or clean it. There are no transit workers in any of these visions. There are no pedestrians. There are no cyclists except as a brief mention in O'Neill's habitat valleys.

The corpus also cannot see the Global South. O'Neill's post-scarcity transportation assumes energy abundance and capital for infrastructure that most of the world in 1976 — and in 2025 — does not have access to. Weizenbaum gestures toward structural inequality but frames it in terms of American consumer culture. The question of what personal transportation looks like for the majority of Earth's population, who in 2025 still rely on motorcycles, minibuses, and walking, is entirely outside the frame. The telescope, configured this way, sees the future of the wealthy world's cities. It misses almost everything else.