\u201cThe act of probing into the future need not be predictive to be useful,\u201d writes historian Adamson. Instead, considering what the future might look like can focus attention on the good and bad of the present. Adamson opens with a fascinating, albeit brief, account of weather forecasting, which became more reliable with the advent of the telegraph: as he notes, \u201ca lot of tomorrow\u2019s weather is already here today; it\u2019s just somewhere else, usually a little farther west.\u201d Just so, a string of futurologists of varying stripes, from techno-guru Buckminster Fuller to the fire-and-brimstone evangelist Billy Sunday, turns up here, attempting to gauge the cultural weather to come. Adamson\u2019s narrative is dizzying in its range of reference, taking in the Ghost Dance of the late 19th century and its sad culmination in Wounded Knee; the Afro-futurist jazz of Sun Ra, who inarguably lived at least part time on another planet; the influence of Edward Bellamy\u2019s wooden but nonetheless popular novel Looking Backward and its reverberations in hundreds of other books (including, Adamson suggests, Mark Twain\u2019s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur\u2019s Court); and the role of futurist predictions in totalitarian movements ranging from Italian fascism to Soviet Bolshevism, to say nothing of the mathematical soullessness of Robert McNamara, which lends credence to Albert Einstein\u2019s maxim, \u201cAnyone who thinks about the future must live in fear and terror.\u201d Futurists remain with us, from the clueless (by Adamson\u2019s measure) Faith Popcorn to the forecasts of singers such as David Byrne and Laurie Anderson: Looking ahead, after all, is \u201cpart of what it is to be human,\u201d and Adamson is refreshingly optimistic on that score.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cThe act of probing into the future need not be predictive to be useful,\u201d writes historian Adamson. Instead, considering what the future might look like can focus attention on the good and bad of the present. Adamson opens with a fascinating, albeit brief, account of weather forecasting, which became more reliable with the advent of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1277,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1276"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1276\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}