Review of *A History of the Future: Prophets of Progress from H. G. Wells to Isaac Asimov*

A History of the Future, by Peter J. Bowler, is a wide-ranging survey of how twentieth-century writers foresaw and imagined the future, that is, our present. As the subtitle of the book tells us, Bowler explores the writings of prophets of progress like H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley and Isaac Asimov. The book’s ten chapters explore the answers scientists and writers offered to questions like where and how human beings will live, what humans will eat, and how culturally shared longings for space travel and interplanetary journeys could be possible. The narrative flows through several plausible prognostics along with many absurd predictions about the future, demonstrating that many prophecies enjoyed a recurring cycle over the last century depending on the ideological and economic mood of western developed societies (mostly Britain and the United States). Bowler claims that

these anticipations of the future are a valuable resource for understanding the attitudes, beliefs and expectations of a generation that was getting used to the idea that the future would not merely repeat the past because science and technology were having irreversible effects on how they live (p. 2).

Their predictions make readers look around to find the many things now taken for granted, like aviation, to discover that not only did they once seem highly uncertain to earlier generations, but the qualified view of experts deemed them most probably impossibilities.

Bowler’s goal is not to judge which prophecies were fulfilled and which were not.  Neither does he aim to praise or disqualify the prophets he discusses. His primary interest is mapping a range of futures, many desired and some feared. However, readers cannot help but compare their today with previously prophesized tomorrows, a provocative exercise leading to questions such as: Were scientists and futurologists in tune with cultural demands in order to offer possibilities or did they produce those demands for the benefit of corporations? Is futurology a scientific method for analyzing how societies change over time or is it an imaginative form of popular entertainment? Depending on the state of the media, the public, and and the country where a work appeared, each of these possibilities can be true.

While intellectual history often privileges highbrow literature and emphasizes the pessimistic approaches of sophisticated intellectuals, Bowler makes a strong case claiming that investigation into popular culture provides more nuanced and contradictory versions of the unfolding future of human history. Methodologically careful in its use of varied sources and conflicting interpretations to avoid false generalizations, A History of the Future provides a historically changing image of futurology based on the links between science fiction literature, popular science magazines, pulp novels, movies, architectural projects and world fairs. Both the connoisseur and the reader unfamiliar with science fiction will find themselves busy (re)reading the novels and watching the movies Bowler brings up in the text.

The subject of futurology demands a good portion of imagination, from the prophets certainly, but also from the readers. It would be expected that images played an important role on this process and one wishes the author had explored the eighteen gray-scale figures and nine color plates more as historical documents and less as illustrations, except for a couple of images followed by a deeper commentary.

It is clear from the beginning that A History of the Future is not a book on theory or methodology. Anachronism and teleology are never discussed as concepts, despite their pertinence for any futurological effort. However, Bowler’s narrative provides many practical examples showing how these concepts operated in the past.  The book brings to the fore the main cultural tropes of the twentieth century: communication; transportation on land, air and space; war; environment; biology and health; technocracy; and utopic/dystopic contradictions (social progress and moral betterment vs. social decay and moral degeneration).

For the twenty-first^–century reader, two of these topics are of particular urgency: communication (e.g., today’s social media) and biology (today’s genetics). We learn that the invention and development of radio triggered predictions about the future of communication. Many feared that worldwide broadcasting of sound and image (with the development of television) would have negative consequences for politics, allowing the state to centralize and enforce control over its citizens. On the other hand, others predicted that, taken to the limit, widespread and instantaneous communication could eventually free individuals from controlled information sources, giving them their own voice, much as was supposed to be the case when personal computers and the web allowed for worldwide messaging services. Looking to our present time, earlier fears of control and freedom seem to have predicted current political concerns, such as the use of false information in election campaigns that ordinary citizens then circulate widely (the book does not discuss this phenomenon).

The chapter “Human Nature” is one of the book’s best moments. Shifting to biology, evolution, and eugenics (the specific areas of Bowler’s expertise), the narrative explores predictions about the future development of the human race. Bowler nicely describes earlier eugenic concerns over breeding of the (un)fit and fears as well as that improving the health of developing countries would lead to overpopulation.  In addition, Bowler reviews debates over nature vs. nurture, and the effects of significantly extending the human lifespan. We learn that intellectuals of the twentieth century advocated strategies for avoiding “race degeneration,” overpopulation, and the eradication of diseases. The discovery of DNA challenged many claims on hereditary traits and behaviors, but the author reminds us that “the tension between the urge to control individual human life and the concern that no rational plan is available to spread the potential benefits beyond the developed world remains to haunt us today” (p. 203).

At the beginning of the book, we read a disturbing description of scientists who allegedly “retreated into an ivory tower and regarded writing for the public as a waste of time” (p. 31). Bowler challenges this view reputing it as “a gross oversimplification, at least for the interwar years. A significant proportion of professional scientists still saw it as their duty to inform the public about science and to engage in debates about how the new knowledge was to be applied” (pp. 31-32, emphasis added). What was most disturbing about this discussion was the time conditional Bowler inserts in the sentence. Perhaps during the interwar years, scientists tried to communicate about their work to the broad public, but is that still the case? Maybe it is hard to find scientists who do not care at all how their findings are being used, but it is not that difficult to find scientists who cannot communicate their methods and results. Some genetic biologists, for instance, seem to acknowledge the situation. Trying to answer why racist groups have so easily misappropriated scientific research on DNA ancestry to support white supremacy, science journalist Amy Harmon argues that scientists “do not have the ability to communicate to a general audience on such a complicated and fraught topic. Some suggest journalists might take up the task.”^[1] Human genetics professor Anna Di Rienzo (University of Chicago) admits “there are often many layers of uncertainties in our findings. Being able to communicate that level of uncertainty to a public that often just sees things in black and white is very, very difficult”^[2] (emphasis added).

If one reads this statement in the light of Bowler’s subject, one finds some broken links between the prophets of the future he discusses, their methods and the current state of the art of science. H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, and many scientists wrote extensively about the future, one of the most uncertain topics of all. If Bowler is right about the engagement of readers with the prophets, it seems that the thrill of such an endeavor rested upon a fragile balance between the uncertain and the novelties that science provided as evidence for a better – or worse – future. Geneticists have been researching the past of humanity for quite some time now. The evidence they use and the results they get seem to escape their control as experts precisely because of a lack of failure to communicate with the general public. If genetic research has been a target of appropriation in the name of racism, scientists have to make a stand. History has already recorded the future of such claims. This surely makes the reading of A History of the Future all the more intriguing.

^[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/us/white-supremacists-science-dna.html

^[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/us/white-supremacists-science-dna.html