It seems clear that many who argue that authors like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne should be read because of their supposed power of premonition don’t care for science fiction yet feel the urge to find a rationale. The joys of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea come from Captain Nemo’s achingly tragic quest for justice, not Verne’s prediction of electric submarines. Wells understood a lot about how the world’s mechanistic turn would overthrow many societal assumptions. However, his utopian enthusiasms also carried him away; see his 1936 sci-fi film Things to Come for both characteristics.
One of the most refreshing aspects of cultural historian Glenn Adamson’s A Century of Tomorrows is how little emphasis he puts on how much the forecasters he studies got right. His survey of futurism looks at all manner of divination, from that practiced by tarot popularizer Arthur Waite to the theories pontificated by management school forecaster Alvin Toffler. It mostly does away with what he calls the “scorecard”:
It gives the false impression that we are wiser just for living later, and unjustly inflicts on previous generations ‘the enormous condescension of posterity,’ to borrow a phrase from the historian E. P. Thompson.
Reducing the work of thinkers about the future to a win/loss ratio not only cheapens their thinking, the book argues, it leaches away the often rich substrata of insights they can provide into not how we will live but how we do live. Adamson sees the people he pulls together in this mostly chronological work (ranging from demagogic preachers to authors and researchers) as storytellers more than anything else. While he is attentive to where they seem to have gone right or wrong, he is primarily interested in the stories they tell.
Adamson breaks his survey of futurism into larger themes (“Machine”. “Garden”, “Flood”) that evoke a certain era’s dreams and nightmares. Threaded through these chapters are multiple thumbnail portraits of fascinating characters whose fierce preoccupation with what was coming showed them to be less starry-eyed dreamers than precise students of what was happening around them. Many were living in times of tumult and imagining either escalated crises to come or possibly a quieter respite once certain conditions had been fulfilled.
Some of the more excitable dreamers were the Bolsheviks, and fellow travelers swept up by the vision and ferocity of October 1917’s toppling of Russia’s monarchy. Lenin’s absolutism and his promise of a clean sweeping away of the old order with all its inequities generated a ferment of utopian fantasizing about the worker’s paradise to come. Once dreamt, this vision was hard to let go of, even once the reality of gulags and crushing anti-individualism came to light.
Adamson quotes Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, an early 20th-century revolutionary feminist and socialist whose fiery speeches led her to be called the “East Side Joan of Arc”. She was charged with being a Communist, and she said to a lawyer at her trial who asked if she would rather be in the Soviet Union, “That’s like asking a Christian if he wants to go to heaven right away.”
Many of the figures profiled by Adamson bring similarly devout passions. One of the most electrifyingly strange is Billy Sunday. A Midwestern revival preacher born in 1862 who barnstormed a rapidly changing America around the turn of the century. He implored heaving, sweaty crowds to take up the sword of “the old-time religion” and use it to slay the “blaspheming, infidel, bootlegging” they saw around them in the fallen world. Remembered today as that abstemious snoot in the Frank Sinatra song who “couldn’t shut down” Chicago, Sunday comes across as a firebreathing apocalypticist who saw the world going to literal hell before him. He also saw a way to make a small fortune from terrifying the citizenry.
Some saw the future as a soon-approaching battlefield where their version of a perfected society could be born. Others believed it was an inchoate space that could be crafted to their liking, often through technology. These mechanically-minded optimists are scattered through A Century of Tomorrows, starting in the World War interregnum when multiple cataclysmic shocks seeded a desire for certainty. Industries from insurance to economic forecasting proliferated, each professing an ability to read the tea leaves and predict what the world would be like years hence.
Among the more common methods of prediction that Adamson looks at are those used by people who take a modern-day trend and follow it to its logical conclusion. The Club of Rome, a hard-to-understand private think tank whose opacity and well-connectedness make it a frequent target of conspiracists, helped lead the 1970s panic around overpopulation. They looked at birth patterns and saw the Earth as soon being filled with so many people that catastrophic starvation was the only likely outcome. Despite being fantastically wrong, their 1972 book, The Limits to Growth, sold eight million copies and can be read now as a time capsule of early 1970s pessimism.
Fortunately, Adamson spends plenty of time with more colorful, unpredictable, and upbeat characters, like R. Buckminster Fuller. A polymathic font of ideas with a Beatnik flair for ignoring form, Fuller started looking to the future at the 1933 “Century of Progress” World’s Fair in Chicago. His “Dymaxion” flying car was a bust (the driver was killed when it crashed on Lake Shore Drive). Still, in the decades hence, he poured out ideas with firehose volume, emphasizing creating utilitarian housing for the Earth’s rapidly growing population. His invention of the geodesic dome as a cheap, scalable structure was not precisely a runaway success outside of communes.
However, Fuller’s gadfly enthusiasms were melded in the postwar years with those of Barbara Ward, an aristocratic British futurist with similar interests but a more structured approach. In 1963, Fuller founded the Delos Symposium, a futurologist convention that today looks like a forerunner of today’s conferences like Davos and Aspen, where smart people gather in lovely surroundings to throw ideas at each other about what tomorrow will bring.
Nobody ever knows what the future holds, of course. This is a lesson driven home time and again by Adamson. As A Century of Tomorrows shows, studying futurologists is a great way to determine the primary crises in their moment. Looking to the future is ultimately more about looking at ourselves. That doesn’t mean people will stop trying to forecast what is to come, even as we hurtle ever faster into the whirlwind.