I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano (1952)
The first rule of soothsaying is to be abstract, generic, and futuristic. Our immediate predictions are invariably wrong: the year 2020 exemplifies the fallibility of our short-term plans. Also, to understand the future, we need to know how we got here and which human factors got us here. Fiction writers of the nineteenth ...