A Century of Tomorrows

How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present

Published by Bloomsbury, December 2025
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“A hurtling history of the art, science and big business of looking ahead.” - The New York Times

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, the book reveals a hidden order: six key themes that have structured visions of what's next. Helping 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, A Century of Tomorrows 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.