From archive (archive)
Subject: New Book: HISTORY OF THE FUTURE
From: wmartin@STL-06SIMA.ARMY.MIL (Will Martin)
Date: 27 Sep 89 18:58:02 GMT



Just checked out a new book from the St. Louis Public Library, and thought I'd
pass on my initial impressions:

HISTORY OF THE FUTURE
A C.H.R.O.N.O.L.O.G.Y     (Yup, they really do put a dot between each letter
                           of the subtitle, and do so consistently. The dot
       by                  is actually at the midpoint of the space, not a
Peter Lorie (text) and     period at the bottom, though.)
Sidd Murray-Clark (illustrations)
(Doubleday, August 1989, $18.95, ISBN 0-385-26298-1) This appears to be
a multinational project: produced by Labyrinth Publishing in Switzerland;
typesetting and color separations done in Florence, Italy; printed in
Hong Kong.

At first I thought this might be a compilation of some sort of reasonable
futurist predictions or speculations, but what it actually turned out to
be was a lot of New Age hogwash and hokum, albeit put together in a
pretty package and amusing enough to scan through and enjoy the images.
It is not worth buying but would be worth getting from the library.

The format is an overview of the next thousand years, discussing them
century by century and emphasizing some distinct aspect of the changes
the authors postulate may occur. Where this scheme really breaks down,
though, is in the fact that it appears to ignore the exponential curve
of change that we have suffered during this past century. A lot of the
things the authors extrapolate for years like 2600 or 2900 will actually
probably come about in the late 2100's or even earlier, assuming we
still exist in a technological civilization at that time. (I was the one
who posted comments some months back about the inappropriateness of such
dates in SF as "2001" and "2010" as being far too soon; now I'm taking the
opposite viewpoint that the dates in here are mostly far too late. :-)

It probably is totally meaningless to attempt realistic predictions of
technology beyond a couple centuries in the future if the rate of change
keeps increasing the way it has over the last few decades. It would be
like trying to foresee the design principles of a CD player when all you
know of electricity is that it is the "galvanic current" that causes a
frog muscle to twitch!

Another thing this book contains is a contribution by Rupert Sheldrake
titled "The Principles of Universal Habit"; the cover blurb describes
this as "invisible fields of energy which form and direct our lives and
everything we live with. These form-fields touch the very core of our
world through their proposed influence on our emotions, our physical
shapes and all our acts and deeds. They decide whether a cell will
become a man or an elephant, we develop diseases such as AIDS or whether
we grow old or die young." [Sounds like there are some similarities here
to "The Practice Effect", perhaps?]

The book is visually pleasing, if a bit chaotic in layout and design. It
should be viewed as an amusing exercise and the occasional
quasi-scientific nonsense can be dismissed as technobabble ramblings.
As I said before, it is worth looking at but not buying.

Regards, Will Martin