August 2007
Intermediate to advanced
190 pages
7h 38m
English
Make Free
WHY DO WE GET THE FUTURE SO wrong? From The Jetsons to Future Shock, from Asimov to H.G. Wells, our species appears to roundly suck at predicting the future. Science fiction tells you a lot about the biases of any given writer’s era, but precious little about the future we’re heading to. (Hence all those wonderful articles from this magazine’s 1930s forebears, like Modern Mechanix, about the coming world of metal men who will wait on us hand and foot.)
Today, futurists talk about whether our next society will be more global, more automated, more religious, more democratic. They point to the signs in the same way the Mesopotamian extispicists did, claiming to see the future in animal organs.
I think they ...