I picked this up, eager to explore predictions for the next decades, but that’s not what I got. It’s a historical account of futurology, which is a social science(ish) of prognosticators. And I was not disappointed. After all, how can we know the future without learning from the past? Adamson deeply explores key figures who shaped the way the past has viewed the future and how those perspectives are still shifting the future of today. (Recommendation will be sent to email subscribers of WordSmarts.com)

This book was my first foray into this topic (perhaps starting off ambitiously) but I enjoyed the way that it broke down not just futurology of now but any sort of imagination of what it is we expect of the future and times to come. I think that the ways in which different ideologies were broken down was interesting and definitely lent itself to more easily digesting the material. The tone is fun and that makes it easy to move through the book. I think there's something about that tone, though, that it makes it difficult to digest his framing of rebellions and revolutions.

The book does not limit itself to capital-F Futurology, Instead, it treats prediction broadly, starting with oracles and looking at anyone who has considered Kingdom Soon; some Kingdoms sooner than others.

The chapters, while still mostly chronological, are a sort of taxonomy of belief in the future, and act as a sort of thesis for the book. Grouping pundits and thinkers into Heaven and Hell (region and ideology); Machine (technocracy and the Singularity); Garden (nature); Lab ('ordinary' Futurology and the science of prediction); Party (counterculture), and Flood (post-modernism and the end of the future) reflects a different way of looking at looking at the future.

This is a bit of head-turning syncretism that in itself makes the book recommendable. Particularly when the future is so readily ceded to [insert Silicon Valley stereotype you dislike the most].

The stories here work through narrative histories of different individuals and how they fit within the subcategory, which grants the book a feeling of something like Plutarch (or even Robert Greene) in didactic biography. Stylistically it is a hoot. The author writes in a cheeky, almost snarky style, and there are a lot of funny asides. In terms of the social history itself, I felt that some of the stronger sections were those discussing Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, the progenitor of so much future, and the sections on actual futurology, specifically the aspects of the influence and interrelation to design. And to Chicagoan, the 'Garden' section is fascinating to look at from modern Urbanism. Most of the ideas herein are functionally pro-sprawl, with a view on infrastructure is either Step Three: ???? or that even by the '30s car culture was invisible and inevitable.

The wry humor has its limits. 'Party' is weak as a chapter because the author cannot even manage a waive to the positive ramifications of the various movements of rebellion. I think this is wrong for a few reasons, pointedly that there are interesting bits as to the core of contemporary life, and it is telling that the liberatory elements are shuffled off to other chapters, but the real problem is that a whole chapter of look at this fucking hippie is tiresome. The author has a weird stylistic tic that is too frequent to be unintentional, wherein each chapter has one biography too far. Each section has one person who does not fit in, or could fit in elsewhere, but instead gets a longer bio to justify their inclusion in this one. I think that the intention is like the categories in the first place, in suggesting revisions to the usual paradigm about forward lookers. It does not work stylistically because it drags the otherwise on-theme chapter in a different direction that clouds the argument.

The book's ideological groupings stand for a progression of the idea of progress, but when the writing is at its most deft is in defiance of that same system. Like one of the reasons the Bellamy section is good is its exploration of who he influenced and who those people influenced. There are a lot of connections, some unexpected, between the people described in the book, and the author points out all the departments of the Invisible College. These joins are interesting as well as useful to understanding what is going on, but it is also at odds, or in tension, with the otherwise clever way the book is structured.

Overall, it is a good intellectual history, if you accept its slanted structure or frame.

My thanks to the author, Glenn Adamson, for writing the book and to the publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing, for making the ARC available to me.

I LOVED this book. Fascinating, insightful, and deeply stirring, A Century of Tomorrows gives us the blueprints of our own imagination, and then traces backwards to show us how we got there in the first place. Dazzling.