Future: A Recent History

Future: A Recent History, by Lawrence R. Samuel. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2009. 244pp. $45.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780292719149.

It was with considerable trepidation that I agreed to review this book. I have been researching and teaching futures studies within a department of political science for almost forty years and over that time have read thousands of books, articles, and plans; discussed ideas about the futures with people in every region of the world; and viewed many movies, videos, and games that purport to be about the future whether from the perspectives of fiction, science, or conjecture. Lawrence R. Samuel was not a person I recognized as being an active member of the futures community, nor has he published in the recognized peer-reviewed futures journals in English, such as Futures, Journal of Futures Studies, Foresight, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, World Future Review (formerly Futures Research Quarterly), or World Futures, none of which he references.

Future is the result of an enormous amount of research over what seems to be a long period of time. There is no doubt that any one person who is completely unfamiliar with America's obsession with "the future" will be stunned by what they read from so many sources and even more stunned by the equal weight Samuel gives to his sources: Cosmopolitan, The New York Times, Popular Science, or - very rarely - some early scholarly source. Samuel relies heavily on Joseph Corn and Brian Horrigan, Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future (1984), which is indeed an excellent source. He also cites five other "histories of the future" pubUshed between 2000 and 2007. Samuel does not contribute anything to our understanding beyond what these have already provided- except for his attention to...