Author: W. Warren WagarWagar is a historian, which makes writing about the future as it if was the past an interesting idea; he terms the concept "prognostics". What's refreshing about the book is his admission up front that the further one looks into the future, the less likely your predictions are to come true (history is a cumulative process). Too often I've found a giant chasm between pure speculation, and dry predictions about the state of technology.
Wagar had the dreadful misfortune to publish the first edition mere months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. To his credit, he had correctly predicted the fall of European communism, but he had expected it to take 50 years longer than it actually did. The book's second edition was published just before the advent of the communications/internet revolution, and so this aspect of the present is conspicuous by its absence in his work.
The third edition of the book (the one reviewed here) continued the streak of bad luck: it was released a few years before 9/11. Terrorism and the "problem" of fundamentalist Islam is given scant mention in the book -- a huge cry from its importance in reality.
As with nearly every single work which attempts to portray the future, this one falls into the trap of predicting that Sci-Fi dream concepts are going to happen very soon. Within the next few hundred years, Wagar has an immortal human race populating the solar system and even travelling to the nearest stars. Although these kinds of things are the fantasy of many-a Sci-Fi buff, actual progress towards these fantasies from a scientific research point of view indicates that it's going to take a lot, lot, lot longer than we think.
By way of example: most futurists and prognosticators routinely ignore the cold, hard, unglamorous facts about space travel: it literally kills you. Absent some huge sheild (like the earth's magnetic sphere), you're going to be cooked by the sun. And if you do make it as far as Mars, living there is much more difficult than is generally realized. Of course, this assumes that you can get off the ground in the first place. Best case, humans will return to the moon in 2015. In other words: despite the technological progress made in the last 40 years, we're no closer to getting to the moon than we were before we started, back in 1960. Wow; let's hear it for progress!
The other thing that I don't agree with Wagar on is his idea of what will happen after World War 3. Wagar sees humankind engaged in a vicious backlash against consumerism and capitalism. While I might be able to accept that the generation who actually lived through the holocaust might be radically transformed, it's more difficult to believe that every generation thereafter will no longer experience greed, drive, ambition, or jealousy.
Wagar's post-apocalyptic society "eliminates" poverty by providing a standard stipend for every human being. While this may sound good in theory, the plain fact of the matter is that if you give 100 people each $100, after a week some of them will have nothing, and some will have $1000. The failure of communism underscores the fundamental aspect of human/animal behaviour: people are more motivated if they get something personal out of it. It's human nature, and no amount of wishing or prognosticating is going to change that.
Next book: The 9/11 Report
