As this book was long out of print, I ended up buying a used copy - from the cover photo I assumed it was a paperback, but in reality it's a large format hardback with colour photos throughout. In a sense this remains more science fiction than anything else. As Clarke himself admits in his introduction, any attempt at futurology can only ever be an 'inquiry into the limits of the possible'. Arguable some of what's in here was predictably impossible even back in 1986, but 'impossible' will always be a fuzzy term when dealing with the future.
The first real chapter focuses on the 1969 moon landing from a 2019 perspective - a 2019 with a 'Clavius City' moonbase, and with a historical look at a (fictional) 1993 speech by a US president, bemoaning the fact that there has been no significant progress in space exploration in the last 20 years. Clarke was not to realise this inertia would mostly last for a further 30 years. He goes on to cover a whole host of topics: healthcare, robots, school, transport, space station life, movies, sports, living spaces, work, psychiatry (bizarrely), the bedroom, death and war. You have to admire Clarke's reach - Alvin Toffler's 1970 megahit of the futurology genre, the extremely stodgy Future Shock, had nowhere near enough range (and Clarke's has pictures). It's going to make this a long review, so buckle up, but I think it's worth taking a look at most sections in some detail.
Clarke's vision of healthcare takes us to a hospital that is as much a community centre and hotel as a place to fix people who aren't well. He tells us that at one end there's an aerobics class, followed by a lecture on 'Eating your way to good health', while elsewhere two new parents share a candlelit dinner (shark and rice) as a group of elderly people watch the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera. This is because it's a 'business with an eye to the bottom line' that is a 'place for the cultivation of wellness.' Clarke certainly captures the rising obsession amongst the chattering classes with 'wellness', but was clearly targeting a purely US market as he pairs a reduction of government funding for health with hospitals being forced to reevaluate their commercial role in society. This view was partly based on an idea that as medical technology gets better, we would need it far less, where in fact the opposite has held true - and seems almost to assume that those inconvenient poor people will have disappeared. In fact, he effectively says they will be denied expensive medical support, but doesn't follow through to the conclusion that they've been exterminated.
Robots are first introduced in the hospital chapter, where they take over the cheap labour work, as well as doing much of the surgery. But in the robotics chapter, we see them in everyday life. Clarke doesn't fall for the 1950s stereotype (or the portrayal in Star Wars). He tells us that a roboticized (sic) home won't have a robot butler or 'little androids scuttling around', but rather a 'small family of intelligent appliances'. In some aspects he's quite close to a modern smart home, including robot vacuum cleaners, though he does give us an unlikely (and unsavoury) vision of a combo fridge and microwave, which automatically heats a ready meal to be ready as you come through the door. Oddly, he imagines homes designed for robots with no clutter and perhaps just one room that humans have to clean themselves containing all their fripperies. It's all a bit cold, Arthur. Arguably the most advanced robots of the real 2019 and later are self-driving cars - but those don't appear.
Next comes education. This is lifelong, which is good of course, though you might raise an eyebrow that some of this is undertaken by a 'McSchool franchise'. Clarke rightly sees new technology requiring frequent retraining (though he falls for the idea that cropped up in the 1980s that there wouldn't be computer programmers as all programming would be done by computers). As with medicine, his vision is very much about the positives for the affluent and doesn't really address the problems for those who aren't in white collar work, nor how we get from the strongly embedded educational structures of the present to his totally different future. Much of his visions of education is through 'televideo instruction' - though we have come to recognise the benefits of blended work for some, there is little evidence that is effective in educating children. And I fear somewhat for Clarke's teachers. Apparently a typical school is based on an existing operation in Clarke's time, the Institute of Computer Technology in Sunnyvale, California (it doesn't seem to exist anymore), which was 'open from 8am to 10pm, six days a week, twelve months a year, with no extended vacations.' We are told that 'artificial intelligence, still in its infancy, will dominate the education system of 2019' - though Clarke didn't say how this would happen.
The travel section begins with an imagined itinerary, which includes a hovercraft, a couple of flights at around 4,000 miles per hour (even more unlikely in the real 2019 was the meal served on board which included veal scallopini or chicken teriyaki 'with complimentary choice of wines'), and rides on the 'California Magnetic Railroad' at around 300 mph. As far as cars go, electric was a no-no - he predicted enhanced petrol and diesel instead - and self-driving seem not to have occurred to him. On the plus side we have built-in satnav, though the maps had to be stored on video disk. At sea, one Clarke's big blunders was a predominance of hovercraft. Similarly, on non-hypersonic planes he oddly predicted the return of propellors. And, of course, he gives us plenty of 2001-style space travel in a way that never really happened. Just watch the movie - no need to go further with the space station chapter.
In entertainment, Clarke rightly saw HDTV threatening the movie theatres - though this was an earlier, CRT-based version of the concept - making cinemas respond with enhanced technology including IMAX. So far, so good, though inevitably some of the possibilities are stretched further than was realistically possible. Interestingly, he did correctly predict the widespread use of CGI, and the ability to produce computer-based versions of actors, though he thought audiences would be interested in a sequel to Gone With the Wind featuring AI versions of the original cast, or the ability to replace a character on TV with their own image. As was common at the time, he was enthusiastic about optical media (what would become DVDs) but totally missed the internet as a means of supplying entertainment (which is mostly passive - no mention of the bigger video game industry). He does give us satellite and fibre optic cable TV, but it's still broadcast rather than streaming.
Sport provides us with a reasonably accurate, if dull, assessment of the increase of use of knowledge, sports science and technology to improve sporting prowess, though this goes a bit far, with his basketball players, who are genetically enhanced to be ultra-tall and muscular. Similarly a little uninspiring, the living spaces section is really just more of the same from the robotics section, envisaging a smart house that, for example, can sense and influence moods. Clarke seems to realise it's a bit repetitive, so turns this section mostly into a piece of fiction about a man and his life with smart house, which begins with a house being accused of murder.
In the office, there are no human clerical and secretarial workers as this is all handled by computers - which, when compared with the kind of secretarial support common in the 1980s (when, for example, most managers still didn't know how to type and would ask for emails to be printed for them to read) has to a degree come true, though of course there are still plenty of people-facing clerical workers, for example in a call centre. More unlikely is the 'intelligence amplifier' which through a connected cap enables the imagined office worker to conjure up pseudo-visual images of AI helpers.
The psychiatry section is a waste of space, while the bedroom section is way out, envisaging many artificial brain stimulation techniques to enhance pleasure as well as partner robots. The death section gives us the real extension of life expectancy (presumably after Clarke had wiped out the short-living poor people), but goes too far, making 100+ a common expectation. Grave markers of 2019 sound dire: they 'contain video screens and tapes of the late lamented'.
The final 'war' section is interesting. Clarke did not foresee the downfall of the USSR, and gives us World War III in 2018. It begins with a workers' strike in East Germany. As this escalates, it results in NATO versus USSR action. Warfare mostly consists of tanks, aircraft and missiles, and is almost entirely directed against military targets. In the end, it effectively ends in a draw with lightly changed borders and no serious damage to the civilian population, though bridges and other infrastructure need replacing. Sadly, modern warfare (thankfully not on the world war scale yet) hasn't managed to be so selective.
It's definitely interesting stuff, and better than much of the futurology I've seen, though inevitably there are big gaps, notably most of our ICT, the environmental agenda and anything about politics. Clarke's view is purely one based on US culture, presumably thinking this would give him the biggest audience, though for a Brit living in Sri Lanka, you might have thought he could have given more of the bigger world picture. What it lacks (and arguably this was true of Future Shock too) is any real idea of life for the ordinary person in the street or any social conscience - it's a cold, hard view of the future for the elite. We may miss some of the high-tech wonders, but I prefer the real 2019 as it turned out, despite all its faults, to Clarke's vision.
As far as futurology goes, this book demonstrates clearly that the genre will never come close to science fiction's ability to play around with future possibilities and improbabilities in an entertaining way. SF is not about attempting to predict the future, it's about 'what if?' - and that will always be more interesting. You might argue this book was science fiction, but as such it could have been better.
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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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