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Dreamers of the world to come, and their (not always accurate) visions.
This Will Change Everything: Ideas That Will Shape the Future
By John Brockman
John Brockman gets 150 of the world’s most provocative thinkers – from Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek to bestselling author Ian McEwan and music revolutionary Brian Eno – to espouse on what “game-changing scientific ideas and developments” they’ll be around to witness, resulting in a blueprint of what could soon be our new reality.
By Paul Milo
Sometimes tomorrow doesn't work out the way even the brightest minds of today think they will -- and yesterday's picture of today provides a great example: where are the domed cities, vat-grown babies, and weekends in orbit? Paul Milo engagingly chronicles the misfires of 20th-century techno-utopians, and explains why their assumptions were so off the mark. He also studies innovations -- like airplanes -- that went against conventional wisdom and actually worked out.
The Predictioneer's Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future
By Bruce Bueno De Mesquita
Bueno de Mesquita has helped clients from the CIA to multinational corporations figure out what’s coming for them (and he claims to have been right 90 percent of the time). He shares how game theory informs his prognostications, and predicts the outcome of some of the world’s biggest problems in this riveting book.
By James P. Othmer
Othmer’s hilarious satire of corporate life and mass media follows a high-priced speaker around the world (Bible conferences, corporate-sponsored orgies on Fiji, etc.) as he tells people what they want to hear about their future. A personal crisis involving celebrities in a space station changes his life forever.
By Edward Bellamy
A sensation when it was published in 1888, Edward Bellamy's fictional presentation of a 21st-century America puts his Bostonian protagonist Julian West to sleep and wakes him up, like Rip Van Winkle in what would be our present day -- "looking backward" from the year 2000 to 1887 at an alternate universe in which all of the world’s problems – war, poverty, crime – have been solved. Bellamy's panorama of harmony never came true, but his vision was both a bestselling novel and an inspiration to social reformers of his day.
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