W. Warren Wagar is Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of History at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Wagar is the author of many books, including The City of Man: Prophecies of a World Civilization in Twentieth-Century Thought and The Next Three Futures: Paradigms of Things to Come.
An imaginary history of the world from 1995 to 2200, this futurist tract can be read as science fiction or as an analytical extrapolation from current political-social trends. With magisterial sweep, it predicts the collapse of the global capitalist system (including the state capitalisms of the Soviet Union and China), the death of six billion people in World War III, mass starvation, the founding of a socialist-democratic world government. Then, around 2140, the Smalls, with their philosophy of eco-mysticism, usher in a decentralized, human-scale socioeconomic order. Wager, a historian at the State University of New York, loads the deck by including almost every conceivable scenario--solar power, colonies in space and on Mars, Arab-Israeli war, the disintegration of marriage and the family, genetic engineering, and so forth. His bold chronicle is thought-provoking, disturbing and immensely worthwhile. (Nov.)
This future world history is presented as the reminiscences of a 115-year old historian, supposedly transcribed from a ``holofilm'' bequeathed to his granddaughter in the year 2200. Wagar is not a science fiction writer, although he uses the genre's methods. In a highly readable style he projects plausible societal futures based upon current trends. He outlines the fall of world capitalism in book one and forecasts shortages of natural resources and a nuclear catastrophe. In book two he describes the establishment of a socialist world government, and in book three tells how a decentralized utopian world community comes about. Since Arthur C. Clarke's July 20, 2019 ( LJ 1/87) and other books have focused more on technological changes in the immediate future, Wagar's sociological speculations constitute an important addition to the field of future studies. Recommended for most libraries.-- Gary D. Barber, SUNY at Fredonia Lib.
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