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

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zero Degrees of Empathy [The Science of Evil] – Simon Baron-Cohen ***

I’ve been a real fan of previous books by Simon Baron-Cohen like  The Essential Difference , so opening this was one was a pleasant prospect. What I found was a book that wasn’t  bad … but that could have been a lot better. I got the impression of a book that had been rushed out without a lot of work going into it. The thesis at the heart of the book – that one of the important ‘circuits’ of the brain is the one dealing with empathy, and that individuals sit on an empathy spectrum, with some residing at zero degrees of empathy – is an interesting one. Baron-Cohen introduces us to three key personality types he defines as ‘zero-negative’ including psychopaths, plus types that are ‘zero-positive’ like those with Asperger’s. In a way both of these definitions are odd, in that his zero-negatives can actually have a lot of the kind of empathy that involves being able to read another person’s emotional state, and his zero-negatives can have a lot of the kind of empathy i...
Post a Comment
Read more