4 May 2013

Movies released
Marvel's The Avengers, released 2012

Popular bad pun of the day
May the 4th be with you.
 

Prediction: February, 1912: Avis Cunningham meets Ernest Everhard at a party thrown by her father John, a professor at the University of California.

Predictor: Jack London, The Iron Heel, published 1908

Reality: Most people today know Jack London from his adventure novels like Call of the Wild, White Fang and The Sea Wolf, as well as a great short story entitled To Build A Fire. London was also a dedicated socialist and polemicist and wrote this dystopian novel of the United States coming under the control of a violent government controlled by the rich known as The Iron Heel.

The story is the diary of Avis Cunningham Everhard, telling the deeds of her husband in the struggle for workers' rights. The other structure on top of this is that the diary was discovered far in the future when a workers' paradise exists, so the dystopian novel gives the promise of a utopian future.

There were a lot of optimistic futurists at the turn of the Twentieth Century, many influenced by Edward Bellamy's 1888 novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887. (Blogger's note: predictions from Looking Backward will be published here later in the year. Bellamy gave note of three exact dates and I'll be publishing predictions from his book on those days.) My futurist man-crush John Elfreth Watkins has several predictions that mimic ideas from Bellamy's novel, as will the optimistic Victorian futurist T. Baron Russell who will supplant Watkins when we run out of his stuff. London is one of the first writers to predict a long hard struggle with many setbacks before the Glorious Future finally arrives. London's "temporary" dystopia gives more room for dramatic action and is certainly an influence on H.G. Wells' 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come and George Orwell's classic 1984, though Orwell explicitly denies a promise of a future utopia in the book's post script.

More stories of the Everhards and their struggles will be published over the next few weeks.


Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!

Tomorrow, we get more predictions about the future of information technology from 1988 about that wonderful future that awaits us in... 2013!

 
Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!