Back in 1987 CE, I finally got round to joining Leicestershire public library. In a way this was entirely superfluous as I was also a member of Leicester University library (and still am, because that’s how it works, although I lost my card a long time ago and last used it in the late 1990s), but the kind of books were different. I used it to get a quick overview of subjects I needed to study in more depth as part of my degree, and also for novels and art books. One of the first books I took out, after Hugh Cook’s ‘The Shift’ which incidentally I highly recommend, was Brian Stableford’s and David Langford’s offering ‘A History Of The Third Millennium’, which is an unfiction book whose image I shall now try to retrieve from the dark recesses of the web:
(actually that’s just Wikipedia). The illustration of the nautilus shell you see on that cover is in fact one of several options, including the acorns which I’ve seen on mine and the library copy, and is a hologram rather than a two-dimensional photograph. There was also a paperback version which I used to own:
The big, hardback version (whereof there was also a large-format paperback I think) scored over the small paperback in the lavish, full-colour illustrations and of course the hologram on the front cover. I don’t know if anyone reading this remembers UB40’s 1982 album UB44:
This was the earlier, limited edition, bearing a hologram, replaced soon after by this:
I actually quite like the second cover as well.
So the thing is, if you were living in Britain in the ’80s, you might have got the impression that the future would have lots of holograms in it. Oddly, the only holograms we seem to see regularly are on back cards. I do not know why this is. It seems to me that they’re still pretty groovy (geddit?) and that they ought to be all over the place, but they aren’t. They do have their drawbacks. For instance, this form of hologram doesn’t display real colours but shows a spectrum of them across the image. There are ways around this but not with printed still images. Nonetheless, representational holograms at least were a fad which went out of fashion and I don’t know why. They were probably replaced by Magic Eye images, also known as random dot stereograms:
I’ve made a few of these, on a Jupiter Ace. They’re quite easy. Another possible visual replacement is the Mandelbrot Set, in a sense.
Just as holograms have gone out of fashion, but seemed like the future at the time, some of Langford’s and Stableford’s book also, unsurprisingly, proved to be highly inaccurate and projected the trends of the time unrealistically, as it turned out, into the future, but other aspects were bang on. There’s also something about the illustrations not being CGI which forges a connection between the reader now, when we are very accustomed to it, and the fact that some of them, although obviously manipulated in an analogue way, had to be based on real models at some point, which gives them a vividness lacking in computer graphics. I almost feel sad to say this because I was very into CGI as a teenager and my main motivation for interest in computers was their possibilities in that direction, but the idea has a kind of soullessness to it which is quite saddening. It isn’t about whether they’re convincing but the need to feel an anchor in the physical world. There’s also artistry in how the images must’ve been created when they are fake. It’s a little like the ingenuity of helical scanning on video cassettes to make it possible at all.
The most glaring anachronism is that the world depicted has the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact persisting for centuries, although it also sees Stalinism as dwindling to nothing very quickly. It was published around the time Gorbachev came to power and after a short period it became obvious that he was going to take the USSR in a very different direction. However, it also predicted that entrepreneurial capitalism would come to an end and that planned economies would become the norm, and this is really what’s happening, particularly in the wake of Covid. What we have now, quite possibly, is a situation where small businesses go to the wall and are replaced by corporations. For instance, a small takeaway could close down due to lack of footfall but its facilities would be bought up by a fast food franchise, siphoning off the income to where it does no good for anyone significant and effectively taking it out of the economy, at least locally. In the book, this process is envisaged as being driven by technological change, where manufacturing becomes more specialised and the division of labour becomes more sophisticated, and this does happen to some extent and may be responsible for the impression I get, at least as an outsider, that individual jobs are often incomprehensible to the people holding them. However, governments are also seen as having to exercise more control over the owners of large enterprises, which I don’t see happening, and I’m also not sure what the writers mean when they say “owners” because of the nature of shares. One thing which does seem realistic to me is the purchase of small nations by multinationals. I can absolutely see this happening and wouldn’t expect it to be confined to small nations either. The description of the real interests of multinationals also seems entirely accurate. They are described as constituting great cartels with no interest in competition, but more in avoiding taxation, protecting their markets and maintaining stability. On the other hand, governments are seen as in opposition to them because they try to avoid taxation, but this is the opposite of the real situation, which is that they prefer to tax the poor and leave the rich to enjoy their stolen money, and perhaps find new ways to take money off the poor. It all seems a bit idealistic really, but still.
An interesting chapter covers a series of epidemics, not really pandemics, which broke out from 2007 to 2060. The first leads to the overthrow of apartheid because it incapacitates all ethnicities in South Africa but because the Whites are in the minority this enables the others to mount an uprising against them. South Africa then disintegrates into a number of small self-governing republics. There is a theme of deniability here and it’s explicitly stated that none of the epidemics are necessarily genetically engineered although many of them were convenient. Several of them seem to be aimed at particular ethnic groups, and it has been mentioned that this might be possible although I suspect it wouldn’t work very well because of the mixture of genes we all have. One seems to be instigated by the US against Latinx immigrants, and not only succeeds but spreads into Mexico, Central and South America and kills many millions, beginning from Los Angeles. This one is rather poignant. It happens in 2015, is limited to a year and is quickly contained in the US by a vaccination program which only takes three weeks. This is amazingly different from the real situation with Covid-19. The attribution, though plausibly deniable, that the viruses involved in all of these are genetically modified is an interesting parallel to the real world conspiracy theory that Covid was genetically modified by the Chinese. In fact, the book also depicts a Chinese virus from Wenzhou (温州) causing sudden hepatitis which kills 38 million. In fact it would be possible to identify genetic modification because entire genes would be spliced in, meaning that long, continuous stretches of genetic code would differ from the wild strains, and at the time of writing genetic fingerprinting was being developed at my alma mater, so in a sense the authors missed a trick. It is in fact the case that we are likely to be plagued by a series of pandemics due to deforestation over the next few decades, and it’s notable that the predictions of death toll are far smaller than the real numbers of casualties we’re currently experiencing. A new variety of AIDS is predicted for 2032, whose long incubation period helps it spread, and it also causes sterility and arose in Poland. The US “triplet plagues” are three simultaneous viruses, one causing paralysis and neuropathy, a second causing leukæmia and a third solid cancers. These kill ten million within a year. By 2060, the viral plagues have ceased, apparently because they hurt the perpetrating groups as much as the intended victims. This particular chapter is interesting to compare and contrast with the reality of Covid and the probable reality of future plagues, although there’s no need for any conscious instigation for this to happen. Also, they were right about the overthrow of Apartheid although not about the cause or the timing – it’s a quarter of a century later here. Another thing they got right, sadly, was that pandemics would be better managed in the developed world than the global South.
The chapters on energy use are interesting. They seem to be based on accurate projections of fossil fuel and nuclear power use although the likes of COP didn’t exist at the time. Coal and oil use peak in 2025 and 2000 respectively, but the cost of fuels relative to inflation rises thrice as high for the latter. It’s a little hard to understand how a fuel used for transport and manufacture is able to rise in price that fast independently of the prices of other goods, but there might be an explanation somewhere in the text. The reason for the rises in price is that increasingly marginal sources are used, particularly for oil, such as oil shales and sands. It can be assumed that fracking is going on given the perspective we have. Coal also becomes more expensive because of deeper mines having to be dug. Imports of oil also get harder due to countries wanting to hang on to their own supplies. This leads to biofuels, mainly ethanol, being developed in countries without these resources. Fission power is if anything less popular than in reality, mainly due to Green parties,which achieve a modicum of power. There is a meltdown in Vologda in 2004, which is probably close enough to other European countries to be significant, and the issue of enforced internationalism is also mentioned, this case being an example of pollution leading to neighbouring countries being concerned about each others’ activities.
The US President Garrity, 2024-32, introduces restrictions on commercial plastic use and fossil fuel automobiles and conspicuous consumption ends. This is unpopular and blamed for a recession, but fuel shortages have already led to a recession by this point which is sufficiently severe that the additional measures make little difference. In fact I wonder if 2024-8 will prove to be Trump’s second term, in which case none of this will happen, and I’m also sure nothing this pronounced was agreed at COP-26. The expense of manufacture and energy leads to the maintenance rather than disposal of equipment, which encourages manual labour again. This again is the opposite of what has happened so far. Built-in obsolescence is a major issue, although there is the Right To Repair movement, and if this succeeds this could lead to the possibility of maintenance and repair becoming more popular by the end of this decade. This chapter also notes that uranium mining suffers from the same unsustainability problem as fossil fuels, but doesn’t mention thorium reactors.
Stableford and Langford blame the energy austerity measures imposed on consumers in the mid-century on profligate use of energy from the mid-twentieth century onward, and we would probably all agree with this. Energy use for individual consumers is rationed and large-scale energy use concentrates on public utilities. Property taxes are based on heating inefficiency, smart meters monitor consumption and issue on the spot fines and long distance ‘phone calls are cut off after a certain period. All of this is intrusively surveilled. Although I can imagine such things becoming necessary, I can’t see them being implemented. Nor can I see steps being taken to prevent us entering this predicament, so there are a lot of questions here about what will actually happen when it comes to the crunch. It is, however, clear that governments are able to exploit xenophobia resulting from this kind of situation, so whatever else happens it seems clear that right wing populism will be fuelled, so to speak, by this kind of crisis. On a side note, it predicts the Roomba in this bit.
Three necessities are mentioned for fusion: an accurate simulation in advance of changes in the plasma in order to continue containment; more powerful and efficient magnetic fields; and, a form of shielding which would absorb most of the neutrons and protect the outer casing. All of these things are solved, and they do seem in my rather naïve view to capture all the issues. The simulation problem is addressed as an outgrowth of what we now call the Human Genome Project, which is referred to as “Total Genetic Mapping”, as software was needed to achieve this. I’m sure that’s true but I’m not sure how this would be relevant, which isn’t to say that it isn’t. In the book, the efficiency of the magnetic fields is achieved by the invention of room temperature superconductors. Finally, the alloy which acts as a neutron sink is manufactured in orbit because only in zero G can metals of different densities, such as aluminium and lead, become an alloy without gravity separating them. I see this bit as an attempt to demonstrate the benefits of zero gravity manufacturing conditions but it is also an attempt to address the problem of the casing being so heavily irradiated that it becomes radioactive waste in its own right and also needs to be replaced. Room temperature superconductors do now exist but only under immense pressure, so another problem has been created. Previously the issue of creating magnets powerful enough to contain plasma under sufficient pressure to cause fusion was addressed by using liquid helium to cool the magnets and circuitry almost to absolute zero, which led to a mind-numbing temperature gradient because the plasma itself was at 150 million Kelvin. Now the problem is pressure, but there may be a hint at a solution when you realise that both the plasma and the superconductor need to be under very high pressure. This is too big a subject to talk about in this post really. Incidentally, fusion reactor efficiencies are misquoted in two ways. Firstly, the ratio of energy input to the plasma to its energy output is not the whole story because total energy input is greater, and secondly the conversion of heat to electricity is only fifty percent efficient at best. There’s also energy input to the tritium extraction process and tritium is also scarce, at one hydrogen atom in 32 million. The alternative is to use helium 3, which is abundant in lunar regolith, but we are not anywhere near managing it at the moment anyway. It’s looking like I’m going to have to blog about this subject separately, but this brings home the interesting topicality and relevance of the book to contemporary events, because all the things mentioned are current issues in fusion research.
By the time fusion power becomes practical, the public and government perceive it as having been dangled in front of them for so long that they’re sceptical and people have also readjusted to the new energy régime. Biotech is also getting all the money because it’s more glamorous, so it isn’t until the 2090s that fusion generators come online at all. Once they have, there are further delays. It’s realised that neutrons emitted by fusion can be used to make weapons-grade plutonium, there are squabbles over the sitings of the reactors because it’s felt that some redress is needed for the global South for the previous amassed wealth achieved via fossil fuel use by the North, and given that they are located there, the cost of building an electricity grid sufficient to carry the power out of the countries considerably offsets the benefits. Deuterium plants also have to be located in or near the sea, so it doesn’t help landlocked territories. There are also teething problems, such as damage to the plant from the intense heat and radiation, meaning that the reactors need to be redesigned and rebuilt.
All of this section feels remarkably grounded in reality and practical considerations. There is nothing waffly in this. I can completely buy the idea that should fusion power ever prove practical, this is very much along the lines of what would happen. We can already see Third World nations objecting to what they see as the North pulling up the ladder after themselves by changing the energy goalposts, and this reluctance is basically the same thing. This accords with the general tone of convincing politicking combined with speculative, but not wildly so, conjectures regarding technological and scientific change. This is definitely hard SF.
Unsurprisingly, an issue following on from this is that of anthropogenic, or otherwise, climate change. The emphasis is on global warming and sea level rise although it is mentioned that changes in ocean currents and rainfall patterns lead to unanticipated results such as a general reduction in crop yields accompanied by sporadic increases in some areas due to shifts making land more suitable for particular crops such as cereals. This can be seen in reality today, for instance with the increasingly friendly English climate for grape-based wine production. It’s also uncertain, in the book, how much fluctuations in solar activity contribute to the situation, but again as in reality, they’re generally thought to mitigate the effects of climate change. Ocean acidification hadn’t been identified as a problem at the time and is therefore ignored, as are the risks from clathrate hydrates releasing methane.
The prediction of sea level fluctuation is that it will rise sixteen metres between 2000 and 2120 at a maximum rate of twenty-four centimetres a year and then drop once humanity gets its act together to a stable level two metres above the 2000 level by 2200. Shanghai is the first city to be affected by the rise, starting in 2015 and being obliterated by 2200. Tokyo and Osaka are similarly threatened but this is overtaken by events because in the late twenty-first century Japan is practically destroyed by quakes and the population disperses throughout the globe. Speaking of quakes, attempts to protect Los Angeles and San Francisco are hampered by seismic activity in California. All of this is quite well thought-through, although I have yet to check the elevation of the relevant cities. More widely in the US, attempts to rescue New York City and Los Angeles are the main focus, leading to resentment in the South, particularly Florida and Texas. The bicentennial of the Civil War in the 2060s leads to civil unrest in the Southern States because of the focus on settlements outside the area. This is a little similar to the Hurricane Katrina situation.
Comparing this with real life, Shanghai is indeed very low-lying at 2-4 metres above sea level. China is also disproportionately affected by sea level rise for a continental nation, as is much of East Asia. In Shanghai, there was catastrophic flooding killing seventy-seven people in 2012 and there are attempts to create mangrove swamps to increase resilience. For some reason I don’t understand, sea level is rising faster in East Asia than elsewhere. How is this possible? Clearly there’s something about the oceans I don’t understand. As for New York City, I don’t know what’s been done yet but there are plans to fortify the shoreline in Manhattan. The devastation of New Orleans also occurs but from flooding due to sea level rise rather than the hurricane, and of course this is still on the cards.
Another successful prediction is made concerning public response to climate change. People take it personally and realise it’s about their children and grandchildren. Having said that, it often seems to me that people are remarkably unconcerned in reality about it and I find this puzzling. But we do have Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion.
The destruction of Honshu occurs in 2084-85 and starts with an earthquake followed by the eruption of Mount Fuji and the emergence of a new sea volcano. This leads to a Japanese diaspora and the blurring of cultural and ethnic distinctions. Clearly this is an unpredictable event although the nations of the Pacific Rim are all at risk. In order to tell a story, the authors have to commit themselves to a particular date and location, but there’s a more general principle here. It’s a bit Butterfly Effect, because it’s equally feasible that it could happened to California, which would have different consequences because of it being somewhat integrated with the rest of the States.
There follows a to me rather depressing chapter on genetically modified food, where the reduction in yields caused by climate change is only mitigated to subsistence levels by the engineering of more suitable varieties for the new climatic conditions. This leads to the production of SCP – Single-Cell Proteins – initially as fodder but illicitly eaten by vegans as a meat substitute until it’s legalised for human consumption later on. Complete foods are also created in the form of grains which contain all essential nutrients, off which the inventor lives for a decade but is accused of cheating. This reminds me of Huel and also breatharianism to some extent. Then there’s a description of all the small-scale subsistence farmers who have been forced off their land by megascale monoculture agriculture growing patented crops, which balances the rather technocratic tone of the previous chapter. These are known as the “Lost Billion”, the number of people affected (short scale), no longer able to farm what used to be their land and reduced to the status of refugees. Some of them resort to armed struggle and others join apocalyptic religious cults as a coping mechanism for the destruction of their way of life. Sea farming also expands greatly, something I personally strongly believe in, in the form of algal and blue-green algal farming, which would serve to satisfy many nutritional needs while redressing the phosphorus imbalance. Seaweeds are also grown, particularly by Australia due to its extensive shallow seas, but also along the entire west coast of South America. This is from the 2060s. In my mind, I envisaged just ordinary seaweed but their version of it is genetically modified seaweed, which is also used for biodiesel. It often isn’t realised how much oil there is in algæ, which I presume is to enable them to float near the surface and photosynthesise. As the authors point out, more than two-thirds of sunlight falls on the sea and it is an underexploited resource. Not that it’s ours to exploit necessarily as it would have an impact on the ecosystem there, but it’s a question of minimising that impact elsewhere.
Unsurprisingly, the most predictable thing ever, the internet, is, well, predicted. Amusingly, ebook readers are for some reason only introduced in the 2060s after false starts from 2005 onward. There are also wall screens. I don’t know if domestic wall screens will ever become popular. In theory we could have them now, as larger screens exist in public places for such purposes as advertising and as whiteboard replacements. All anyone need do is buy one and put it in their home, but people don’t do this. Maybe they will one day, and it’s important to remember that this is supposed to be about what happens in the next 979 years. Speaking of which, it also speaks of financial transactions going through a cycle of security and insecurity, which is entirely feasible if quantum computers develop the capacity to hack encryption through fast factorisations.
Then they talk about employment. They see it as eliminating white-collar jobs faster than manual labour because of the need to maintain new technology and the damage done by climate change. Hikikomori are also mentioned, though not by name. It’s described as “TV withdrawal” and as affecting mainly people in poorer countries, who seek to escape from the reality of life into the more idealised version, particularly in advertising, seen on television. There is resistance to home-working and people continue to commute because they see working at home for pay as unnatural. I can see some of this to be sure, and for the real world there’s the issue of economic support for ventures which are used by commuters and people going to work such as fast food stands and sandwich shops, among other things. City centres also stayed expensive. An interesting phenomenon which as far as I know hasn’t happened is an organisation known as Speedwatch, starting in 2004, which begins as a mutual support group for the victims of dangerous drivers and develops into a vigilante group assassinating motorists who exceed the speed limit or otherwise drive dangerously, which although it ends in the perpetrators being imprisoned is argued to make roads safer by introducing a deterrant. Restrictions on private vehicles increase while the leaders are in jail, and in 2021 on being released, they claim to have won. Public transport is boosted. Now this would be sensible, which probably explains why it hasn’t happened. Electric cars are introduced but are underpowered. The Sinclair C5’s successors, planned in reality, are more successful. The time frame is approximately correct, with petrol cars ceasing to be manufactured in 2030, by which time there is in any case more home-working. Airships come back too, for obvious reasons. I really want this to happen but don’t think it will.
That, then, is the first part of the book. The wider sweep of the worldbuilding, which extends far beyond the third millennium, was used as the basis of much of Brian Stableford’s fiction, such as the Emortality Series and his short story ‘And Him Not Busy Being Born’. His earlier novels bear no relation to all of this as far as I can tell. David Langford mainly writes parodies, such as ‘Earthdoom’, which I have read, but also came up with the idea of the brain-breaking fractal image known as “basilisk”, which leads to online images being made seriously illegal. He writes the newssheet ‘Ansible’ and also the Ansible Link column in ‘Interzone’, and has won more Hugos than anyone else ever. The rest of the book is also interesting but tends to branch out beyond what’s relevant today. There is a first contact towards the end, but since humans have been so genetically modified by then, it doesn’t really feel like one. They also remove the natural limit on the human lifespan, so there are no longer such things as disease and old age, and this is an important issue in much of Stableford’s work.
It isn’t so much about accuracy and datedness that this work is interesting as the focus on Realpolitik and the quality of the research put into it. Yes, it’s dated and yes it reflects the time it was written in (these are not the same thing), but it’s also believable and quite frank about the risks we present ourselves with, particularly in the area of climate change and fossil fuel use. I highly recommend it, even now.
A Box Of Chocolates 