A Short History of the Future

Rating:
Summary: uncreative rehash of 100 years of ill conceived utopias
Review: First let me say that I did not dislike this book because it presented a leftist utopia: I *loved* the novel _Ecotopia_, because it was genuinely different; something new under the sun.

A Short History of the Future, on the other hand, was a tired rehash of every leftist utopian scheme I've ever seen, and even lifted Chomskian phrases and Marxist rhetoric and just pasted it in. It's fine to have a well thought out leftist vision of the future, it's pathetic and lazy to have a recycled cut-and-paste vision of the future, no matter what the political viewpt.

In the author's future history, capitalism betrays itself by concentrating wealth ever more densely in the hands of just a few. The Evil Capitalist Overlords, in an updated version of Marx, use up their middle manager in a white-collar hell of forced relocations, long trips, etc. Happilly, the Soviet Union persists into the middle of the 21st century (yes, the self-described "futurist" author, writing in 1988, missed the fall of the USSR less than two yrs in the future) and provides an alternative. From the thesis and antithesis of capitalism (you can tell this was written by an academic) comes a vaunted Third Way (wow, this is *really* new stuff; I haven't seen such ideas since...well, any progressive newspaper from the 1920s...). The third way has class conciousness merged with ecological conciousness (wow! amazing! Who could imagine such a thing in 1988...besides, say, the German Green party?). Child raising is gradually passed off to professionals, and marriage becomes delegitimized and illegal.

Oh, to make this only slightly disguised academic manifesto really sad, you have to know that the founder of the Third Way political group was a graduate student in the early 21st century.

The book has a lot of great reviews on the back cover, but careful reading shows that most of them come from friends and associates of the author: log-rolling at its finest.

This book is almost unreadable.

Save your money.

Rating:
Summary: already dated
Review: Reading this book ten years after it was written made it very hard to get into it. For one thing, the author still talks about the USSR and East Germany, and those countries faded away so long ago that the whole book seems dated. It's hard to suspend disbelief and imagine this book was really written far in the future.

Rating:
Summary: Distractingly wrong
Review: The author of this book, Warren Wagar, is apparently a professor of "Future Studies." I certainly hope he has long been fired from that post. "A Short History of the Future" was written in 1989, but the writer is so ignorant of politics, and so WRONG, to be blunt, it reads as if it was written in the 1940's. Orwell's 1984 is more on the mark than this.

He shows barely any creativity in his "predictions" and clearly was barely even aware of much of the contemporary political developments of his time. The fact that he assumes the Soviet Union will continue plodding along well into the 21st Century is incredibly naive. The fact that he assumes the nation's socialist economy system would survive equally long is similarly bizarre. Did he read the newspapers? Did he pay ANY attention to that Gorbachev fellow and the path he was bringing Russia down?

And honestly, did anyone really expect that Germany would remain divided into two states until time immortal? Or that Latin America and Africa would remain dictatorships forever? Or that black rule in South Africa would not occur until 2014?

If this book had been written 30 or 40 ago, it would be excusable. This book is just sloppy. He doesn't even do a good job describing how his corporations take over the world. Everything is just described in these overly flowery sweeping generalizations. Like "and then the capital lords seized control of the governments and made the state wither like an autumn rose." That sort of thing.

The author is clearly an "ivory tower" academic who believes history can be predicted sorely through dry Marxist theory and analyzing dubious vague "trends." The fact that this book became horribly dated something like three years after it was published is quite a strong indictment of a man whose entire job was devoted to predicting the future.


Rating:
Summary: If Nostradamus wore Birkenstocks . .
Review: The one star I gave this schlock is for the readability of the prose. At least that has substance. As for the actual content . . . Take Marxist revolutionary theory, give it a plot and a timeline, and you have this book. The author actually used the word "bourgeoisie" as a prosaic tool. Bourgeoisie? Please.

Granted it was written some 15 years ago, before the events of 1989-90 played themselves out. Still, the fact that this howler wasn't immediately recalled en masse is illustrative.

Don't waste your money.

Rating:
Summary: Best Utopia of the 20th Century
Review: This book is a career-crowning triumph. Wagar fans who have read "Building the City of Man" or his introduction to "The Open Conspiracy" will anticipate about a third of this book, but the investigation beyond the World Party is breathtakingly good. The book soars because it is not only first-class futurism, but also captivating fiction. Not every historian is also a great novelist, and so "A Short History of the Future" is a surprise. The book's strength is its credible presentation of alternate (centralized and decentralized) long-term scenarios. Its weakness is that it was written before the collapse of the USSR, and proposes a path that did not turn out to be so. But if you read past the particulars to the underlying dynamics, the analysis is both graceful and incisive.

Rating:
Summary: The unreformed Communists are still with us.
Review: This is an amazing book, I wish more were writen like it but it seems that many authors do not have the intelligence or sociological grasp of the future as does W. Warren Wagar. This story is not an 'end of the world' type genre story but the ultimate truth that one arrives to is that no government, scientific, or socioligal schemes or ideologies are going to perfect man. though we may be a more advanced people who change in beliefs and idea over the span of human history, we still will generally be human, and W. Warren Wagar accomplishes this profound realization. I feel fortunate that there is atleast one book about the future that does not put us in a utopia or self destrusted hell on earth but rather the same innevitable patterns of history; were still living, and life is still hard.

Rating:
Summary: Engrossing read
Review: This was one of the most engrossing books - at the juncture between fiction and reality - that I've read for quite some time. It's certainly light years ahead of any (serious) fiction available at the moment - the next best contemporary fiction I've read is by Don DeLillo - but this book by Wagar demotes that type of quick-kick action into the pornography league.

Yes, the world is a sad and boring place, there really isn't a hell of a lot that's worth reading out there, and I doubt whether any other book that's equally engrossing as Wagar's will be written by anyone, fiction-writer, social historian or philosopher, for at least another 100 years. I can only recommend people to return to the greats of world literature - the epic sagas in particular - as a way out of the current cultural poverty. Then again, this is what makes a great read, that it only comes along once a century or so.

The reason why this is a good read, and most other stuff on bookstore shelves isn't, is no great mystery: Wagar has read more, sifted reality and thought further than 99% of academics and fictionalists alive today. It must have driven him to near insanity, but he did it. Genius is 90% or so hard work, and Wagar has done his homework, reflected, studied the facts.

That said, this probably has to be seen as science fiction in retrospect. The collapse of the Commonwealth is akin to the collapse of Communism in 1991. We are now in something similar to the era of the 'Smalls' and ecomysticism - i.e we are currently living 'utopia'. The US may have to implode as well. The future has in a sense been abrogated. We should abrogate this tacky utopia now and start grappling with reality again - which means using enlightened common sense to establish a non-bureaucratic world order of law, and constructive help to those who are mired in poverty the world over. We should also allow, and even find ways of encouraging, those who are bent on war to slaughter one another, while airlifting civilians out to safe zones.

In a sense, ideology has come to an end, that's why we're more or less heading for a synthesis between Wagar's Commonwealth and House of Earth - or at least we should be - this is what any thinking person should realise by now and should start working towards in the confines of his/her own life. Better this realism than more utopias, more science fiction, more ideologies. There won't be any more good reads available for a long time to come - so kick this stuff, get out of your solipsism, and return to the human fold.