A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present

An acclaimed cultural historian takes readers on an intellectual thrill ride through the kaleidoscopic story of futurology, a surprisingly powerful force in the modern world.

For millennia, predicting the future was the province of priests and prophets, the realm of astrologers and seers. Then, in the twentieth century, futurologists emerged, claiming that data and design could make planning into a rational certainty. Over time, many of these technologists and trend forecasters amassed power as public intellectuals, even as their predictions proved less than reliable. Now, amid political and ecological crises of our own making, we drown in a cacophony of potential futures-including, possibly, no future at all.

A Century of Tomorrows offers an illuminating account of how the world was transformed by the science (or is it?) of futurecasting. Beneath the chaos of competing tomorrows, Adamson reveals a hidden order: six key themes that have structured visions of what’s next. Helping him to tell this story are remarkable characters, including self-proclaimed futurologists such as Buckminster Fuller and Stewart Brand, as well as an eclectic array of other visionaries who have influenced our thinking about the world ahead: Octavia Butler and Ursula LeGuin, Shulamith Firestone and Sun Ra, Marcus Garvey and Timothy Leary, and more.

Arriving at a moment of collective anxiety and fragile hope, Adamson’s extraordinary book shows how our projections for the future are, always and ultimately, debates about the present. For tomorrow is contained within the only thing we can ever truly know: today.

Glenn Adamson is a curator and cultural historian. His books include Craft: An American History, Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects, and The Invention of Craft. His work has been published in Art in America, Antiques, frieze, and elsewhere. He was previously director of the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, and has held appointments at the Yale Center for British Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He divides his time between London and the Hudson Valley.