Histories of the Future [Paperback]

"Telling of timelines to the end of time and boom times for imagining the future, this fine book is a boon for all of us who tune in for such timely discourses. Astute essays--and a chancy global futures card game--take the reader from salvage frontiers in South Kalimantan; to desert folk futurologies in Rachel, Nevada, and lived surreal cityscapes in Irvine, California; to fraught future makings through art, technology, and social movements in the Philippines and Japan; to that end-of-the millennium portal, Heaven's Gate. Histories of the Future experiments with topic, genre, and mode. Its own narratives of the metastasizing metanarratives of late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century future making are at home in trauma time, everyday time, Big Time, prophecy time, local nonstandard time, and global time. Asking how to examine grand stories with local acts, this valuable collection makes palpable the rich collaborative thinking that bound the authors as they studied the shapes of futures already lost and futures still imaginable. We never get Big Stories out of place; rather, Histories of the Future gives us robust places, artifacts, practices, texts, and performances in which narrative control of possible futures is at stake."--Donna J. Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz "An eclectic, provocative mix of ideas and approaches united by their common intelligence and lucidity, the essays in Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding's Histories of the Future tease out unexpected adjacencies between a welter of social, political, and cultural scenarios that touch on questions of the yet-to-come. This is a book that should be read by anyone with an interest in the relationship of the future to the past--and of the present to both."--Jeffrey Kastner, senior editor of Cabinet magazine " ... the essays demonstrate that the junkyards of the present proffer rich prospects of futurity where every nut can find a niche."--TLS, 13 January 2006 "The volume as a whole manages to cover a satisfying range of subjects in the wide net it casts. There is enough in it to indulge the interests of individuals ranging from New Deal historians to die-hard sci-fi fans... Histories of the Future gives us a few things to think about as we forge ahead with our short-sighted addiction to progress."--Kathleen Quillian, Leonardo Reviews "The essays demonstrate that the junkyards of the present proffer rich prospects of futurity where every nut can find a niche. More illuminating and frequently more amusing is the use of utopias for social comment, critics and satire."--Eugen Webber, TLS "A fascinating account of the multiplicity of futures and future nostalgia that mark not only North America but non-Western contexts..."--Graham J. Murphy, Science Fiction Studies "What distinguishes this collection above all ... are the rich connections, links, and echoes across the pieces. This is a genuinely collaborative and carefully knitted-together project, in which contributors not only workshopped their pieces, and commented upon and responded to each other's work over a number of years, but also went on excursions and site visits together. This collection not only offers diverse and striking perspectives on the histories of the future, but also represents a sophisticated model of how to stage a conversation concerning this."--Gerard Goggin, Media International Australia "Entertaining and worthwhile reading."-- M/C Reviews "Required reading for anyone who wishes to think about the particular contingent developments of sf; to see more clearly the ground against which the figure of sf is often cast; and to comprehend more fully the ways in which the genre is only by convention a separate unique figure rather than an integral and interwoven part of that ground."-- Mark Bould, Extrapolation "Histories of the Future succeeds in unifying a variety of texts, multitudinous in form, by means of recurring themes such as boundaries, technology, risk, paranoia and fatalism... The argument--that personal futures need not be closed off by official futures, and that all futures are haunted by the ghosts of past futures--is sustained throughout."--Matt Harvey, Social Semiotics

We live in a world saturated by future-consciousness. Our lives are constructed around expectations of the future as full and as flawed as our understandings of the past. This volume is a conceptual tool kit for thinking about the hopes and anxieties embodied in ideas of the future. Exploring links between panic and nostalgia, waiting and utopia, technology and messianism, and prophecy and trauma, it brings together critical meditations on the social, cultural, and intellectual practices that create narratives of the future. Prognosticators, speculators, prophets, and other visionaries have their say, but the volume's emphasis is on smaller narratives, on the connections between expectation and experience in daily life.The contributors trace futures as they are imagined in sites as diverse as Rachel, Nevada, the "ufo capital of the world;" the gambling, savings, and stock market investment strategies of postwar middle-class American families; the private and published writings of science fiction author Philip K. Dick; and early-twentieth-century futurist art movements in Europe and Japan. They examine how cell phones created a new kind of revolutionary anticipation in the Filipino People Power movements, how Christianity and alien visions coalesced to produce an expectation of impending apocalypse within the Heaven's Gate movement, and how information technologies, and particularly hypertext, reorder knowledge and expectations."Histories of the Future" is punctuated by three interludes: a game in which readers are encouraged to use icons of companies, persons, products, and places to form future narratives of their own; a short story in which the renowned fiction writer Jonathan Lethem imagines the future as a gigantic traffic jam; and a remarkable graphic research tool: a timeline of timelines. The contributors include: Sasha Archibald; Susan Harding; Jamer Hunt; Pamela Jackson; Susan Lepselter; Jonathan Lethem; Joseph Masco; Christopher Newfield; Elizabeth Pollman; Vicente Rafael; Daniel Rosenberg; Miryam Sas; Kathleen Stewart; and, Anna Tsing.