Waterstones Four Futures
255 ratings
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Price: £9.99
Brand: Waterstones
Description: It is easier to imagine the end of the world, the theorist Fredric Jameson has remarked, than to imagine the end of capitalism. Jacobin Editor Peter Frase argues that technological advancements and environmental threats will inevitably push our society beyond capitalism, and Four Futures imagines just how this might look. Extrapolating possible futures from current changes the world is now experiencing, and drawing upon speculative fictions to illustrate how these futures might be realized, Four Futures examines communism, rentism, socialism, and exterminism-or in other words, the socialisms we may reach if a resurgent Left is successful and the barbarisms we may be consigned to if those movements fail.
Category: Books
Merchant: Waterstones
Product ID: 9781781688137
Delivery cost: 2.99
ISBN: 9781781688137
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Author: Jon A. Crowcroft
Rating: 5
Review: This is a thoughtful piece (set alongside Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism..) with extremely good background reference material pointers. The framing of the ideas as speculative (social science-) fiction is a neat one, though for someone who reads a LOT of SF, it misses some seminal futurism work (e.g. John Christopher wrote a lot of stories about semi-utopic possible futures much as pictured here, back in the 60s, plus Neal Stephenson's work often contains back stories of a similar nature (e.g. the Diamond Age, although most of the SF literature i've seen takes the dystopic alternates presented in this work - Ursula Le Guin's Dispossesed actually has 2 contrasting planets so she can contrast the dystopia with a near utopia which has scarce resource, which is an interesting departure from the scenarios here). That's just a minor whinge, though, as this is clearly written, and is something we all will have to confront in the next couple of decades, as the pace of environmental change picks up and the deployment of mass scale automation (e.g. self driving cars/trucks, smart homes, potentially free at the point of use green electricity, etc) accelerates. Current tired political dogmas of the left an the right are failing to address either of the key challenges discussed here in any meaningful way, so its great to have a clear, and relatively undogmatic dissection of the choices ahead.
Author: Kate
Rating: 4
Review: An interesting and thoughtprovoking little book, well worth reading. The use of four contrasting scenarios works well, and draws out the key point - that politics determines our future in tandem with technological change, rather than one or the other independently. Ironically (given the author's insistence that this is a work of social-science-fiction rather than direct futurism) much more plausible and useful than Paul Mason's attempt at a similar exercise in PostCapitalism.
