Prophecy
Last update: 19 Jan 2003 12:57First version:
Amongst all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitious.A.k.a. futurology. Bunk, of course --- see Popper --- but there's a damn lot of it, and I know of at least one case where it has served a useful function. (Namely, the efforts of J. B. S. Haldane, Bertrand Russell, and J. D. Bernal inspired much good science fiction, as have the more recent efforts of their self-conscious successor Freeman Dyson.)
---George Eliot, Middlemarch, bk. I, ch. 10
- See:
- J. D. Bernal, The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1929)
- Freeman Dyson
- Infinite in All Directions
- Imagined Worlds [I've written a review --- Uncle Freeman's Stories --- on why I don't take even Dyson at all seriously]
- Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism
- J. B. S. Haldane, Daedalus, or Science and the Future (1923)
- Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism
- Bertrand Russell, Icarus, or the Future of Science (1924)
- Bruce Sterling, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years (2002) [Futurology by an excellent science fiction writer, fully conscious of the fact that it's going to look bizarrely wrong in much less than fifty years. Very good as a tour of underappreciated bits of the present.]
- To read:
- B. de Jouvenal, Art of Conjecture
- Max Dublin, Futurehype [It appears Mr. Dublin only objects to optimistic futurologists, as he takes Jeremy Rifkin's nonsense about entropy as gospel.]
- Donna Goodman, A History of the Future
- Nicholas Rescher, Predicting the Future
- William Sherden, The Fortune Sellers
