Skip to main content

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects - Adrian Hon ***

Adrian Hon has taken the concept of the successful BBC radio series 'A History of the World in 100 Objects' and imagined a future version of this, looking at dates from 2020 to 2079. Hon makes it clear in his author's note that this is intended to be informative fiction rather than futurology, but the reality is that all futurology is fiction, and it's inevitable to read this book as much in the vein of futurology as pure science fiction.

Certainly the New History shows the futility of futurology as anything other than fiction, since the 2020/2021 examples have no reference to the pandemic - which is particularly ironic as object number 10 is an automated courier, first used to take something to a market, which is demonstrated in Wuhan.

To begin with, I really enjoyed the entries. (They can't really be referred to as objects because many of them are events, people or documents, rather than actual objects.) The first, for example, really brings out the power of the approach when it presents us with the pros and cons of an ankle tag for convicted criminals that is combined with smart speaker type technology to monitor exactly what they do and say.

Admittedly, some entries have irritating omissions, often when Hon becomes a bit too enthusiastic about the technology without thinking through downsides. So, for example, the second entry is a children's toy that is made lifelike by being effectively a remote-controlled puppet - there is no consideration of the potential for child abuse here. Similarly, the timescales can be hilariously over-compressed. So, for example, we see the adoption of a whole new hardware and (sub-vocal) messaging system which is already carrying billions of messages per day by 2022.

Nonetheless, for the first third of the book or so, I very much enjoyed reading the entries. After that, the novelty started to wear out and it became something of a chore to read the rest. It might have been better to pick fewer items and to have given longer and more interesting stories to them - the 100 objects format constrained the book into something that wasn't as readable as it could have been.

Two other moans. You can't blame the author, but some of the ideas are very familiar from existing science fiction. So, for example, 'object' 72 is downvoting, which is almost identical to the premise of the Black Mirror episode Nosedive. Perhaps less forgivable is the lack of portrayal of political developments outside of China. There is a lot of focus on China, but Russia hardly gets mentioned, while the assumption seems to be that both the USA and the EU will not see any further developments as a result of the political problems they are both currently facing.

A genuinely fun and interesting idea, but as the dire H. G. Wells future history style The Shape of Things to Come demonstrated, even the best writer of science fiction can struggle to make this kind of material enjoyable reading for a full-length book.

Paperback:

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Govert Schilling - Five Way Interview

Govert Schilling is an acclaimed and prize-winning freelance astronomy writer and broadcaster in the Netherlands. His articles appear in Dutch newspapers and magazines, but he also has written for New Scientist, Science and BBC Sky at Night Magazine, and he is a contributing editor of Sky & Telescope. He wrote dozens of books (including a couple of children’s books) on a wide variety of astronomical topics, many of which have been translated into English, German, Italian, and Chinese, among other languages. In 2007, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) named asteroid 10986 Govert after him, and in 2014, he received the David N. Schramm Award for high-energy astrophysics science journalism from the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society.His latest book is Target Earth . Why science? We live in troubling times. Fake news and conspiracy theories abound, and trust in science is diminishing. Many adults don't seem to realize that almost everythi...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinite Book – John D. Barrow ****

Authors are often asked to review books on a topic they’ve written on themselves. The reasoning is sensible – they ought to know something about the subject – but there’s always that uneasy suspicion that there’s going to be a bit of bias creeping in. So I think it’s only fair to admit up front that I have written a book on infinity (of which more later). Infinity is a wonderful subject, because it’s intimately mind-bending (if the combination sounds paradoxical, that’s what infinity is all about) and gives you the chance to pull in all sorts of different concepts and assocations along the way, something Barrow does with great gusto. There’s a surprisingly large amount of coverage here for God, and for the universe, and the book jumps around from Aristotle to Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel (explained at great length), from the paradoxes of infinite sets to the paradoxes of time travel. Overall it’s an enjoyable journey that gives plenty of opportunity to be amazed and surprised. The...
Post a Comment
Read more

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...
Post a Comment
Read more