The third millennium: A history of the world, AD 2000-3000

This isn't a novel, but is nevertheless fiction. It's an ambitious attempt to present a comprehensive future history—as it might be written in AD 3000—ranging across a thousand years and all fields of human activity. It's a substantial piece of work, plausibly written in considerable detail and well presented, with plentiful and ingenious photographs.

The aim seems to have been to bring together as one coherent whole many of the common predictions of modern futurism, rather than to indulge in boldly novel speculations. Indeed, anyone familiar with the field of futurism, or sf, may find this a surprisingly conservative vision, considering that it comes from two sf writers.

I mean this in two different senses.

Firstly, there's an almost complete absence of really unexpected developments—those discontinuities in history which can never be predicted except by a wild leap of the imagination. Their absence preserves the rather scholarly and respectable air of the book, but at the cost of some credibility: the future just won't be this predictable.

Secondly, everything seems to happen very slowly. Science advances more slowly than we've been used to in recent centuries; technology lags behind it as usual; and political developments seem incredibly slow and limited, with no substantial changes to the international pecking order, or to the political systems of the major countries, over most of the thousand-year period.

But I suppose this conservatism follows naturally from the concept of the book. After all, one could hardly attempt to predict a thousand years ahead while taking into account a realistic rate of change and the customary incidence of unpredictable social and scientific revolutions. Fantasize, yes; predict, no.

I don't think one can write history, especially future history, without some sort of political slant. However, these two seem ‘pragmatic' centrists, and what comes over is a cynical distrust of all ideologies. They cover politics in adequate detail, but I deduce a lack of real interest in the subject.

The Langfordian sense of humour is not entirely absent, and I suspect there are more in-jokes than meet the eye. But I wonder who was responsible for the juvenile invention of a firm of vintners called Misttafelwein GmbH (a name unlikely to achieve a good market image in Germany); and they seem unaccountably proud of the idea of a lightweight tractor—which would surely be incapable of pulling any substantial load unless its wheels were treated with a magic friction enhancer.

I suppose the ideal reader of this book would be someone who has suddenly become interested in the future and wants a general overview of current thinking on the subject. The literature of futurism is now considerable, but most books deal with specific aspects of the future, and over a more limited timespan. The advantage of this one is that it lays the whole thing out in front of you as a single coherent presentation—although, curiously, the authors missed a trick by not including a chronological chart of the main events. Considered as an introduction to futurism, its main defect is the lack of references or bibliography, though such intrusions would have marred the fictional concept.

(Review written in 1985)