A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the PresentGlenn AdamsonBloomsbury$29.69Anyone who thinks about the future, Albert Einstein wrote in a contribution to the 1939 Worlds Fair time capsule that was intended to be opened in the year 6939, must live in fear and terror. Today, nearly 85 years later, the great physicists words feel like good advice. As we enter a new year, the future can seem bleak with challenges ahead: The ever-present climate crisis, uncertainties around AI, wars around the world, the instability of democracies How can we not live in a constantly anxious state? Einsteins words appear around a third of the way through historian Glenn Adamsons dazzling new book, A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present. But unlike Einstein, Adamson aims to look backwards, not forwards; he surveys the history of futurology, trend forecasting, and predictions. Once relegated to the mysticalthink prophets, witchcraft, and Tarot cardsAdamsons story begins at the turn of the 20th century, when futurism moved from the spiritual to the concrete. [Futurology] takes the broad view, making predictions about society at large, usually over a relatively long time span, Adamson argues. It is an incredibly varied activity, undertaken by social theorists and political activists, trend forecasters and insurance executives, architects and industrial designers, urban planners and military war gamers, fiction writers and film directors.Adamson moves seamlessly between this diverse group of thinkers and mixes sci-fi writers and government bureaucrats in scenes set in corporate boardrooms and hippie communes. We see how Robert McNamara and the rise of the managerial class creates systems of planning and big data to project into the future and, later, considers Stewart Brands Whole Earth Catalog, a counterculture publication deeply interested in the future that inspired thinking dominant in Silicon Valley today. These examples are contrasted with new wave science fiction writers like Ursula Le Guin, whose work challenged power and gender dynamics, or Samuel Delany, whose work Adamson argues predates contemporary discourse around trans and intersectional identity. Taken together, Adamson makes the case that looking into the future is actually a way to contend with the conditions of the present. A Century of Tomorrows is structured both chronologically and thematically. To provide a clean framing device, Adamson focuses primarily on the United States, a country that has always thought of itself in futuristic terms: The new world, the frontier, where tomorrow happens first. The chapters march from the early 1900s to the near-present day, establishing a movement from machine to garden or lab to party and ending with the flood, an apt and varied metaphor for our present moment that draws on religious imagery to describe an ever-present feeling that there is too much pollution. Too much information. Too much complexity. Above all, too much change in too short a time. The future, much the like genre of sci-fi, is a generative setting for the cultural imagination, a stage on which all our dramas are acted out, Adamson declares. Within this structure, he shows us how these visions for the future can often be both in opposition and in dialogue. There are always multiple attempts, happening at once, to make the future real. The irony is this future-thinking is no guarantee for a better future; the futurologists Adamson shares were often wrong as much as they were right. Solutions for todays problems are not a clear map for tomorrow.Glenn Adamson (Courtesy Glenn Adamson)Design is one of the major through lines in Adamsons text, and so designers, architects, and urban planners are recurring characters along the way. Take Norman Bel Geddes: The theater set designerturnedindustrial designer possessed a showmanship that was evident in Horizons, a self-promotional book published in 1932 that projected what the future might look likeif Bel Geddes himself were put in charge of it. Or consider Margaret Hayden Rorke, the pioneering color forecaster, who landed a government advisory role where she recommended to Herbert Hoover that the red, white, and blue of the American Flag should be standardized. She also led the Textile Color Card Association, a consultancy whose influence on American fashion is unrivaled. Then, of course, theres Buckminster Fuller, who Adamson calls the centurys quintessential futurologist, as he was throwing off proposals and theories, provocative and preposterous by turns, impossible to summarize that were rooted in the idea that humans should design as nature does. Prior to this book, Adamsons scholarship as a writer and curator focused largely on the history of craft and what he has referred to as material intelligence. His previous book, Craft: An American History, told the story of this idea in the United States. He wrote in the introduction that A Century of Tomorrows is, perhaps, a mirror of his earlier book. Craft is often understood as a repository of tradition, an embodiment of the values of care and empathy that are conspicuously lacking in modernity, he observed. Futurology, by contrast, is habitually impatient with inherited wisdom. Its practitioners are inclined to shift aside the weight of precedent and ally themselves with technological disruption. The designers and architects who appear throughout this book seem to bridge this divide, as they turn the abstract ideas of the future into the materials of the present.The future has been on Adamsons mind for years, it seems: He was one of the curators of Futures, an exhibition that opened at the Smithsonians Arts and Industries Building in late 2021. A concern for younger designers also seems to power Adamsons busy schedule: In 2024 he was the artistic director of Design Doha, a new biennale for MENA creatives, and curatorial director of Design Miami with the theme of Blue Sky.Reading Adamsons history reminds us that even within moments of darkness in the 20th century, people worked towards a better tomorrow. Perhaps Einstein was wrong: Considering the future is inherently an optimistic endeavor. To think of the future is to believe that there will be one worth living in. To believe that the future is a lost cause, or that all the answers to our problems are to be found in the past, Adamson wagers in his conclusion, can only lead us to very dark places. To imagine the future, then, is the first step in redesigning the present. Jarrett Fuller is a designer, writer, editor, educator, and podcaster. Hes an assistant professor of graphic and experience design at North Carolina State University and the host of the podcast Scratching the Surface.