Futures galore

Seems to be a small burst of future-related speculation, rising above the usual background level, at the moment.
Some is good old-fashioned feelgood technophilia. Michio Kaku has a new TV series airing in the US – which is being elucidated helpfully on the Panopticon blog.
It isn’t around in the UK yet, but judging from the lavishly [...]

Two dimensional optimism

A rather nice sub-division of optimism in a vintage tome on The Image of the Future by one Fred Polak.
Any society, he argues is characterised by a particular image of the future, which defines it srelation with events to come. And optimism-pessimism here can be mapped in two dimensions – essence-optimism (or its [...]

Archaeologies of the Future

Fredric Jameson has registered faintly on my radar for years, but I’ve never followed his trajectory. But a title like Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and other Science Fictions demanded a look as I tick off titles with the f-word in them.
It’s an undeniably impressive piece of work, which would demand [...]