Here’s the draft preface to the book I’ve completed recently (it’s currently out to publishers and agents for consideration). You’ll hopefully get the idea of the book from this - let me know what you think!

“That’s how each of the three sections (robots, cities, space travel!) of The Usborne Book of the Future begins. Written by Kenneth Gatland and David Jefferis, it was published in 1979, and it was one of my favorite books when I was growing up.

Nothing dates as fast as ideas about the future. And you can certainly play that game with the Book of the Future, subtitled A Trip in Time to the Year 2000 and Beyond. So no, our houses don’t yet have automated servants handing out trays of drinks, and there aren’t robotic forest firefighters. Or everyday Space Shuttle flights, space elevators, factories in orbit, or massive domed cities, let alone an Olympics on the Moon (predicted for 2020). Many of the timescales for new technologies are way off, although maybe one day we will inhabit cities in space (indeed, some of today’s billionaires are counting on it).

And yet, as anticipated in The Book of the Future, we do carry minicomputers in our pockets, much more powerful than the ‘risto’ watches featured in the book, and our homes are full of inter-connected gadgets. Robots have “increasingly take[n] over the jobs of skilled engineers in factories.” Artificial intelligence is advancing into our lives. Shopping is increasingly online (The Book of the Future predicted that TVs will be “used to order shopping via a computerized shopping center a few kilometers away”). Electric vehicles will eventually become widespread (the book predicted an “almost totally electric world”). Computerized weapons systems are shaping the future of war. “Electronic conferencing” is finally common, but not, as we now know, because of “convenience”. And some people are experimenting with sea-borne living, like the floating pyramid cities featured in the book.

That it got at least some of these predictions largely right isn’t surprising. The Book of the Future was based on the research of scientists and organizations including Bell Aerospace, Boeing, and NASA, alongside Arthur C. Clarke and Omni magazine. But there were other things about the future the book spent much less time discussing.

I was born in 1971. The generation before me, some of them, could still be excited about The Future. As in The Book of the Future, they could believe they would go into space and eliminate poverty, crime, war and disease on Earth. A generation later, as a child I still read comics about daring space adventurers, but I also knew they had a decidedly retro, 1950s feel to them. They were yesterday’s future, not the actual future.

As I grew up, the future seemed to get darker, it was darker: the possibility of nuclear annihilation in the Second Cold War, demonstrations, strikes, mass unemployment, increasing inequality, and the growing sense, as the punk movement put it, of ‘no future’. As we’ll see, this was reflected in fictional depictions of the future. From the late 1960s onwards, there was a new adultness in science fiction, including at the movies. Technical advances in filmmaking helped, but the real progress was in its subjects: there was less about fantastical aliens, and more fatalism about humanity and its future (or lack of it).

Today, young people are even more anxious about what’s to come. Unfortunately, it’s probably worse than most of them imagine. In their future, they could see civilization collapse, due to everything from climate change to wars over dwindling resources. In some of its fundamental warnings, the dystopian sci-fi of the 1970s is fast turning into fact.

To understand what happened to the future, we have to go back to when I was young, to a point when two very different futures were possible and the choice between them was still being made. In between its Lunar Olympics and interstellar starships, what really strikes me looking back at The Book of the Future (and at the time, as I remember), is the double-page spread titled “Two trips to the 21st century”, and the stark contrast it presents between a “Garden city on a cared-for planet” or a “Polluted city of a dying world.”

In the latter, there’s over-population, vehicles trundle along powered by gasoline (alternatives were not pursued, leaving no options as oil runs out), the environment is dying, the air is a chokingly thick brown orange (people wear gas masks), urban infrastructure is decaying, and people are out of work and under-fed. Fake plastic trees line the roads. But in the former, fumeless hydrogen and electric powered vehicles glide through a refurbished, greenified city beneath a monorail and alongside pedestrian and cycling lanes. The air is a fresh spring blue. The plants and trees are a vibrant green.

There were two possible futures back then, so it seemed, one darkly dystopian, the other much brighter – not a whizzy 1950s Jetsons techno-utopia, but still a pretty good one.

What I realize now, and we’ll discuss in this book, is that these two futures were based on predictions set out in landmark publications like The Limits to Growth, published just a few years before in 1972. And we’ll examine how, contrary to their fierce critics at the time, the scary predictions made in these publications are increasingly coming true.

We didn’t heed these warnings, or those depicted in popular culture ever since. This book is about why. The short answer is that, starting in the 1970s, an organized and well-funded campaign was mounted against recognizing the threats we faced, and it succeeded in persuading people the future would effectively take care of itself.

Indeed, we’ll see how it was these predictions of a dark future that helped to propel – in some ways helped to create – a new political movement, which until the 1970s was relatively marginalized. What’s been neglected in previous histories is how its attractive promises – that there were no limits to growth, and technology would solve the problems we face – were crucial in bringing them, and a new type of politician, to power. And so we set off towards one of the two futures sketched in my children’s book – the wrong one.

We can’t say we weren’t warned, including by some of the best science fiction films of the past fifty years that depicted future dystopias, which we’ll use here to discuss what’s going to happen next. We’ll also uncover the surprising hidden meanings of these films, meanings that are now more relevant than ever (there are major spoilers for the films).

It’s not the future we want (most of us, anyway), and it’s not the one we were promised. But the more we understand what’s coming, the more we might be able to prepare for it.

So, read on, not into the fantastic, but definitely into the dramatic, world of the future…”