Future Perfect: What next? And Other Impossible Questions, by Robyn Williams; Allen & Unwin, $17.95, pp 171. ISBN 978-1-74175-318-9, website
Robyn Williams wrote 2007: A True Story, Waiting to Happen in 2000, "In a burst of rage" at the extinction of species, and the ruination of reef and rain forest. In this fantasy of a near-future (where John Howard is still Prime Minister) animals take over the world, exacting a long-overdue revenge. A science journalist with the ABC for 35 years, Williams has received various honours — a visiting professorship at Balliol, a star named after him in the constellation Carina — none of which has diminished his self-confidence. His latest work, Future Perfect, is concerned — as the subtitle indicates — with "What next? And other impossible questions". The book begins with the assertion that "Thinking about the future is not a normal human activity". Nevertheless it is one that Williams is prepared to undertake, considering in sequence the futures of communication, science, God, transport, cities, sex, innovation, work and last of all 'The Future of Us - Our Last Century?'
The introduction is unpromising, evincing signs of haste that are evident throughout. Then again, urgent matters are being addressed. Some 35-40,000 years ago, Williams proposes, "We invented culture". Evidence: cave paintings in France and Australia, Usually he condescends to the past, better to concentrate on what has not yet come to be. Thus only at harvest time could "peasants [gather] for a grim romp". Galileo enters next: "his cosmology affronted the Church, but that didn't worry him". In fact, the threat of torture, death, an end to scientific experimentation, worried him constantly. No matter, Galileo is soon shuffled offstage so Williams can recollect an appearance of his before an audience of Year Ten students: "I was as familiar as Tycho Brache to the eye-rolling, lounging youth". But he tunes in to their bleak pessimism, their helpless fate as "shuttlecocks of circumstance". Direly, it seems to him, we "have abolished the future yet again".
Time, then, for the book proper to begin. Much of what follows is sage judgement from a mind that is formidably well-stocked. In 'The Future of Communications', Williams persuasively asserts that "We move too much and are beginning to think about the benefits of staying still". Just so, but how can we insert a slow movement into the hectically-paced symphony of modern times? This chapter ends, as