A CENTURY OF TOMORROWS

A history of the future—or better, the many futures that seers and scholars have painted in the past couple of centuries.

“The act of probing into the future need not be predictive to be useful,” writes historian Adamson. Instead, considering what the future might look like can focus attention on the good and bad of the present. Adamson opens with a fascinating, albeit brief, account of weather forecasting, which became more reliable with the advent of the telegraph: as he notes, “a lot of tomorrow’s weather is already here today; it’s just somewhere else, usually a little farther west.” Just so, a string of futurologists of varying stripes, from techno-guru Buckminster Fuller to the fire-and-brimstone evangelist Billy Sunday, turns up here, attempting to gauge the cultural weather to come. Adamson’s narrative is dizzying in its range of reference, taking in the Ghost Dance of the late 19th century and its sad culmination in Wounded Knee; the Afro-futurist jazz of Sun Ra, who inarguably lived at least part time on another planet; the influence of Edward Bellamy’s wooden but nonetheless popular novel Looking Backward and its reverberations in hundreds of other books (including, Adamson suggests, Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court); and the role of futurist predictions in totalitarian movements ranging from Italian fascism to Soviet Bolshevism, to say nothing of the mathematical soullessness of Robert McNamara, which lends credence to Albert Einstein’s maxim, “Anyone who thinks about the future must live in fear and terror.” Futurists remain with us, from the clueless (by Adamson’s measure) Faith Popcorn to the forecasts of singers such as David Byrne and Laurie Anderson: Looking ahead, after all, is “part of what it is to be human,” and Adamson is refreshingly optimistic on that score.

An illuminating look at past and present efforts to gaze into the crystal ball.