Future

W. Warren Wagar'sA Short History of the Futureis a memoir of postmodern times, cast as a history. This powerful and visionary book is narrated by a far-future historian, Peter Jensen, who leaves this account of the world from the 1990s to the opening of the twenty-third century as a gift to his granddaughter. A combination of fiction and scholarship, this third edition of Wagar's speculative history of the future alternates between descriptions of world events and intimate glimpses of his fictive historian's family into the first centuries of the new millennium. "Thanks to Wagar's magisterial command of futurist information and theory, his extrapolated near-term future is an incisive, dynamic vision of where we may indeed be heading."H. Bruce Franklin,Washington Post "A comprehensive, massively detailed script of a possible near future. . . . Intriguing."San Francisco Chronicle "A Short History of the Futurereads with ease, raises provocative possibilities and presents challenging occasions for thought and argument."Chicago Tribune "A breathtaking future history in the manner of Wells and Stapledon, unnerving in its mixture of fact, fiction, and personal perspectives."George Zebrowski,New York Review of Science Fiction

W. Warren Wagar is Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of History at the State University of New York at Binghamton.