The 1975–1979 corpus reveals a striking split-screen: two authors imagining personal transportation in 2025 from opposite directions, and both getting it wrong in ways that illuminate exactly what their era couldn't see.

Gerard O'Neill's The High Frontier imagines transportation as a solved engineering problem — the "commutersphere," the "magneplane," the "travelsphere" — vehicles requiring no engines, no crew, no petroleum, costing a fraction of contemporary jet travel. His vision is abundant, frictionless, and collective in infrastructure even when personal in scale. A couple takes a "runabout" to the magneplane station, boards a travelsphere, and arrives in a habitat with a different climate and language — all for less than the cost of a short car trip. The specificity is remarkable: he calculates load factors, amortization schedules, passenger-mile costs. What he cannot imagine is that this frictionless future would be built on top of, not instead of, the automobile. He assumes the car gets leapfrogged.

Mark Adlard's Multiface takes the opposite approach and is, in some ways, eerily closer to present reality. His future London features electric autos hired by credit card from terminals, navigating a bewildering autocomplex between sectors. The vehicles are tiered by cost — the cheapest a rectangular black box without doors, the most expensive a silver shape "like a spaceship on wheels" that costs two months' increments for a one-way trip. There's a manual you study for months before attempting the interchange. This is recognizably the world of Uber surge pricing, congestion zones, and the London ULEZ — stratified access to mobility, bureaucratic complexity, class encoded in what vehicle you can afford. Adlard even gives his future car a self-profiling seat and near-silent gas turbine, and has his character nostalgically imagining the horror of old combustion engines vomiting carbon monoxide through the Channel Tunnel. He got the electrification. He got the class stratification. He missed the app.

Joseph Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason arrives at personal transportation from a completely different angle — not imagining its future but diagnosing its present pathology. Writing in 1976, he identifies the private automobile as the paradigm case of technological lock-in: computers were used to automate production lines so consumers could choose "from among millions of trivial options on their new cars" rather than being offered genuinely different vehicles or a meaningful alternative in mass transit. This is not prediction but structural analysis, and it's the most accurate thing in the corpus. In 2025, the automobile industry has done exactly what Weizenbaum described: used computational power to multiply trivial differentiation (trim packages, color options, infotainment variants) while the basic form — individual combustion or electric vehicle, privately owned, road-dependent — remains largely unchanged. The computer didn't liberate transportation; it optimized the existing system's grip.

[O'Neill, The High Frontier, 1977] contributes the era's most technically detailed alternative vision. His magneplane passages are doing real engineering work — superconducting magnets, vacuum guideways, computer-controlled intervals — and his "commutersphere" concept anticipates maglev transit that actually exists in limited form (Shanghai's Maglev, Japan's SCMaglev). What makes him valuable for Retrostition is precisely his confidence: he assumes petroleum scarcity will force the leap. The 1970s oil shocks made this seem inevitable. It wasn't. His vision tells us what 1977 thought the pressure points were.

[Adlard, Multiface, 1975] is the corpus's most underappreciated source on this lens. The tiered electric auto-hire system, the credit-card scanner at the terminal, the incomprehensible interchange map, the class difference between sectors expressed through vehicle access — this is a recognizable sketch of London's current transport geography. His character Jan luxuriating in a self-driving auto through the Channel Tunnel while the navigation system blinks amber warnings is closer to Tesla Autopilot on the M20 than O'Neill's travelspheres are to anything operational in 2025.

[Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 1976] provides the structural diagnosis that neither O'Neill nor Adlard quite articulates. His argument — that computers were deployed to optimize existing systems rather than transform them — explains why we got electric vehicles that are still individually owned, road-dependent, and status-differentiated rather than the collective transport infrastructure O'Neill imagined. Weizenbaum saw the path dependency that the optimists missed.

[Clarke, The View from Serendip, 1977] is peripheral to this lens but contributes one genuinely prescient aside: his prediction that improved communications would reduce commuting, with "ninety percent of the average executive's business" performable without leaving home. He frames this as a 1990s development. It arrived in 2020, forced by a pandemic rather than technological readiness, and it has reshaped urban transport demand in ways none of the other authors anticipated.

The 1975–1979 corpus approaches personal transportation through three distinct frameworks that don't talk to each other: the engineering optimist (O'Neill), the social realist (Adlard), and the structural critic (Weizenbaum). The optimist assumes scarcity forces transformation. The realist assumes the present system persists but electrifies and stratifies. The critic assumes the computer will be used to deepen existing dependencies rather than escape them.

From 2025, the structural critic was most accurate, the social realist was surprisingly close on texture if not mechanism, and the engineering optimist was right about the technology (maglev exists, electric vehicles exist, computer-controlled transit intervals exist) but wrong about the adoption trajectory. What none of them saw was the smartphone as the actual transformation layer — not a new vehicle or a new infrastructure, but a new interface onto the existing one that reorganized access, pricing, and class dynamics without changing the underlying road system at all. The app is the missing variable in every passage retrieved.

This corpus is almost entirely British and American, and almost entirely male. The transportation futures imagined here are built around the commuter, the executive, the couple going out to dinner — mobile individuals with credit and leisure. Adlard's sector system hints at class constraint but doesn't center it. Missing entirely: the perspective of people for whom personal transportation has always been a problem of access rather than a problem of technology. The Global South's explosion of motorcycle taxis, minibuses, and informal transit networks — which in 2025 move more people than anything O'Neill imagined — is completely outside this frame.

The corpus also has no fiction set in the developing world, no authors writing from outside the Anglo-American technological imaginary, and no texts that question whether personal transportation as a category is the right unit of analysis at all. The blind spot isn't just demographic — it's conceptual. Every author here assumes the individual or small group as the basic unit of mobility. The question of what transportation looks like when you design for collective movement first, individual movement second, never gets asked.