The following is a description of the book
It can be purchased at: http://www.overlookedbooks.com/atitle.php?id=87
A History of the Future is a vast but orderly chronicle of the next five hundred years, set down not as 'perhaps-this-or-perhaps-that' conjecture, but as though historical fact accurate to specific days and years. A map for every science fiction fan and every reader who wishes to test in his/her own mind the plausibility of another's vision.
It is a fact of our mortality that we can never know the future. Yet nothing can quench this deep yearning for a glimpse into the world that will follow ours. Twenty and thirty somethings are particularly susceptible to the future's appeal and a century of science fiction stories has attempted to address the subject.
A History of the Future, however, answers the need more directly. It is not a story in the usual sense, but a document of sweeping scope that recounts the history of mankind as though the next five hundred years were already in the past. It begins so near to our own time that we easily recognize the significance of the events described and then, year by year, steps away from our present to chronicle the sorts of great changes that must inevitably overtake humanity.
As the work of an engineer, A History of the Future pays loving homage to the technological changes that have always had a most profound effect on our development. Physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering, communications, aeronautics and weapons science are all there. But so are music, the fine arts, architecture, politics, alliance formation, diplomacy, wars and natural catastrophes. And 'History' does not describe these events in 'wooly' Nostradamus terms: it gives us the names and provides us with the dates. How accurate are they? As accurate as any vision of the future. They are as good as we can have.
A History of the Future provides science fiction, video gaming and futurology fans with a sweeping historical structure in which to set their favorite stories. How would classic sci-fi accounts fit in? How could such storybook events be linked to our very real present? The patient chronicle of A History of the Future provides the background.
The book is accompanied by a series of detailed appendices that authoritatively catalogue the peoples, places and things of these years and allows us as readers to briefly indulge the fantasy that the future is indeed known.
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