The authors of this book came up with what looked like a sure-fire proposition for the publisher - in the early 1980s, they pitched the book along the lines of "In ten years' time, there'll be lots of books forecasting the next millennium - so here's your chance to get in early and steal a march on the competition!"

It was a persuasive pitch - the book sold. Sadly, like most prediction/futurology, real life has a habit of biting you on the bottom. Just four years after publication, the Berlin Wall came down and suddenly, everything was different. Given that the book describes policies coming out of the Soviet Union into the 2800s, it rather throws the rest of the futurological stuff out of kilter.

Other speculations go just as wide of the mark, especially when talking about the 21st century. The growth of the Internet and communications technology generally isn't foreseen anywhere near as soon as it actually happened. It's only as the story moves into the further future that the fall of events becomes more likely-sounding. More generally, the style of writing comes over as rather dry; the parts written by David Langford and dropping the occasional in-joke into the text are welcome for being a little less arid.

Science fiction is not the same as prediction (sf authors keep saying). But perhaps this would have been better if it really had been written and marketed as science fiction, say as an episodic future-historical novel in the vein of Kim Stanley Robinson. Names of future political leaders, scientists or opinion formers are dropped into the text, and they could have been selected and inserted at random for all the sense one gets of these names representing real people. Far better, perhaps, to focus on a few of these individuals and to actually write a story about them. (Indeed, Brian Stableford did use this book as a framework for his Architects of Emortality series.)

This is probably worth acquiring if you see a cheap second-hand copy and have an interest in one or both of the authors. The hologram on the cover was very much a marketing gimmick of the time; another publisher beat this book to market with a holographic cover by a few weeks, much to the chagrin of Sidgwick & Jackson.

A different kind of science fiction book. What will the next 1000 years of the future look like? Written in the mid 1980's, it ventures a fairly optimistic view of the future after some rough spots. Some neat concepts and ideas.

Here we are 12 years into the next millennium and some predictions weren't so accurate. Others are still evolving. Interestingly, I think the Internet/Web was totally missed. Right now it is the center of innovation, imagination and information sharing for the modern world. I wonder what the center of attention will be in the next 20-50 years or later?

The concepts and ideas presented by the authors tend to be slightly green oriented. But, if we are to have a future, maybe that is the way we must go to make it. Fun reading. Neat drawings and Photoshopped images. ( )

Science fiction writers tend to insist that they aren't writing predictions, just stories. Well, these two have had a go - it's a story cast as a history book, with extra corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude. The book was published in 1986, so the perils of predicting the future are immediately visible, as the authors failed to predict the fall of the Berlin wall, and the flavour of the internet and the world wide web. But after the first hundred years or so of the history they start to break free from the second millennium, and the fun really starts, as the world tackles climate change, nuclear arsenals, hunger, poverty, old age and a very nonthreatening ice age.
It looks like the history is tied into Stableford's Emortality series, but I won't know for sure until I can get hold of that series and start to read it.