The Future That Awaits Us — Surviving Ourselves

The Future That Awaits Us is a full future history of the next two centuries, told in five eras by an imaginary historian of 2226 — with the author stepping out between chapters to show his reasoning, name his bets, and grade the great futurists (Verne, Wells, Orwell, Huxley, Clarke, Le Guin) with two hundred years of invented hindsight.

Inside:

Era I — The Great Acceleration (today–2050): the Verification Wars, the labor Redefinition, and the constitutional convention that gave machines the right to refuse.

Era II — The Long Emergency (2050–2080): a billion people moved, famine's missed century, the Pandemic of '61, and the first child born off Earth.

Era III — The Turning (2080–2120): population peaks at 9.4 billion, humanity votes on the planet's temperature, and abundance delivers its final exam.

Era IV — The Divergence (2120–2170): the species forks into three branches — and survives itself by eleven days.

Era V — The Inheritors (2170–2226): the Settling, the Rewilding, life found on Europa, and the final ledger.

Plus: era timelines, diagrams and twelve photographic plates illustrating the key chapters, obituaries & birth announcements of the coming century, recovered "documents of the future," a glossary, the Futurists' Scorecard, and four alternate endings — the moments the story ends, and the present-day decision each one turns on.

Every event in this book is invented. Every trend underneath it is real. That is the point.