By Katrina Gulliver

In the year 2000, people will get around with personal flying suits and have food brought to them by pneumatic tube. That's the kind of vision of tomorrow that was being presented a century earlier. The future was coming, and it would be magical. Techno optimism, with a dash of fantasy.

By the late 20th century, the future boosters were competing with doomers, who warned of overpopulation, environmental catastrophe, nuclear war. The future was coming all right, and you might not like it.

In "A Century of Tomorrows," Glenn Adamson, a cultural historian and the author of "Fewer, Better Things" (2018) offers a sweeping survey of future predictions, from 19th-century science fiction to Grace Jones at Studio 54. As Mr. Adamson describes it, futurology is growing in importance. "The increasing legitimacy of futurology is one of modernity's defining features: In an era of acceleration, when the future seems to arrive faster and faster, technical and scientific means have been deployed both in the service of that acceleration and in an attempt to predict its course." But, depending on how you define it, futurology has always been important. In the ancient world, emperors would turn to their haruspex to predict the outcome of a battle. Shamans would be consulted for their visions of what lay ahead.

Mysticism has long been interwoven with "scientific" futurology. Mr. Adamson demonstrates this with a story about tarot cards. The modern deck, with which most of us are familiar, was created in 1909. Far from a lingering remnant of medieval culture, it was a reinvention for the era of mass production, sold with a mythology. Its designers were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, one of many occult groups that emerged in the late 1800s. They reimagined the tarot from centuries earlier, adjusting the figures and symbolism to fit their view. Mass production meant millions of decks could be sold. But to the public it was the idea of continuity to history that was part of the tarot's appeal. We want to see the future, but believe we're doing so while using ancient wisdom. To reach ahead while still feeling a comforting tether to our forebears.

Other developments did allow us to see the future, in some ways. "Consider the field of meteorology," Mr. Adamson writes, which emerged in the mid-19th century. "The key conceptual breakthrough was that -- as in the tarot, but in a more empirical sense -- the future was contained within the present. That is, a lot of tomorrow's weather is already here today; it's just somewhere else, usually a little farther west."

It's easy to look at futurologists and see in their visions a clear reflection of the anxieties of their time. Fiction writers of the late 19th century, such as H.G. Wells, were responding to the Industrial Revolution and the arrival of the machine age: Would humans be made redundant in this mechanized world, or would we be the beneficiaries of a technologically enhanced future? Mr. Adamson mentions one writer, Samuel Butler, who mused in his 1863 essay "Darwin Among the Machines" that humans might evolve into machines.

A turn against industrialization led some to romanticize a soft-focus vision of rural life. This was visible in the aesthetics of the Arts & Crafts movement, and attempts to shape new styles of living based on traditional forms. The Garden City movement in England, for example, sought to change the model of housing, with planned towns close to agricultural food supplies. (Others, such as the Bolsheviks, wanted to reshape things more radically.)

The author discusses Buckminster Fuller with his geodesic domes as offering one vision of the future (brought to mass attention at the 1964 New York World's Fair, which featured a domed pavilion). Fuller didn't invent the dome, but he patented and popularized the concept in the U.S. Today there's one at Disney's Epcot theme park in Florida called "Spaceship Earth." Such tessellated domes are now part of the visual vernacular in movies showing architecture of the future or on other planets.

The range of ideologies Mr. Adamson brings into the big tent of futurology is broad indeed. Marcus Garvey's Pan-Africanism is mentioned, as is Steve Jobs and Apple Computer. By Mr. Adamson's standard, political activists and creators must be futurologists, as they attempt to conjure a future that is different from the one they believe is going to occur. Any desire for change is a wish for a different future.

The atomic bomb showed us how quickly a future could be ended, and writers responded with visions of the postapocalyptic world, often ones in which gender and racial dynamics are upended. Samuel R. Delany's story "Aye, and Gomorrah" is a clear argument for gay liberation, and includes the line "you don't choose your perversions." Alternatively, we have Ursula Le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness," which she later argued was a thought experiment "not to predict the future" but to "describe reality, the present world."

The counterculture movements of the '60s and '70s had their own ideas of the future, or at least of redesigning how they lived -- although, as Mr. Adamson points out, hippie-ism was a symptom of affluence: These middle-class kids could afford to drop out. They wanted lifestyles that reflected their values and allowed them to break free of social strictures. In his telling, LSD was a futurological aid, letting users step free of the perception of time. However, while acid trips might have shown hippies a vision of the future, this wasn't something that could scale. And it didn't solve the practical problems of creating a new world. Someone in the commune still had to make the lentil stew.

Meanwhile, the hippies' classmates who didn't drop out, who got jobs and bought houses in the suburbs, were soon reading bestselling doomer tomes: Paul Ehrlich's "The Population Bomb" (1968), Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock" (1970) and the Club of Rome's "Limits to Growth" (1972). The world was overpopulated and everything was going to hell. This fit neatly with America's growing cynicism and the oil crisis, but had some disastrous effects, including encouraging coercive sterilization in developing countries.

Then came the fall of the Soviet Union. After that, attempts to imagine a new humanity quickly fizzled out. Science-fiction cinema, for instance, has now moved from a genre in which "the future was figured as an exciting encounter with another world, intersecting our own," to a series of tropes about the zombie apocalypse. Our future paranoia has turned introspective, and the danger is us.

The futurologists we encounter today are thought-leader gurus, or men on Instagram telling you what the stock market is going to do. Doomers tell us the end is nigh, but it still might be worth buying crypto. The future is either a wave we should want to catch or a dystopian hellscape we should dread.

We've been living in the post-2000 future for nearly 25 years. I still sleep on a box-spring mattress and cook oatmeal on the stove in the same way my great-grandmother did. I don't have a wing suit. The future must be running late.

--Ms. Gulliver frequently reviews books for the Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

December 27, 2024 10:27 ET (15:27 GMT)

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