July 20, 2019: Life in the 21st Century

by Arthur C. Clarke

Futurists will welcome this book by the science fiction community's prolific dean whose 1963 classic Profiles of the Future defined possible futures, some of which already have come true. Clarke rejects any label as prophet; as per Profiles' subtitle, he deals with "limits of the possible." In July 20, 2019, he views a day in the life of the 21st century. The oversize, illustrated book forecasts how people are born, live, and die. We ride orbiting space stations, watch 60-year-old, 8-foot athletes, see that people have been replaced with computers and robots, view most aspects of life—schools, transportation, medicine, work, movies. These are astonishing but realistic perceptions by a master of the craft who as always writes with skill, wit, clarity, and remarkable intelligence.

Genres: Science Fiction, Space, Fiction, Futurism

281 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1986

About the author

Stories, works of noted British writer, scientist, and underwater explorer Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, include 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

This most important and influential figure in 20th century fiction spent the first half of his life in England and served in World War II as a radar operator before migrating to Ceylon in 1956. He co-created his best known novel and movie with the assistance of Stanley Kubrick.

Clarke, a graduate of King's College, London, obtained first class honours in physics and mathematics. He served as past chairman of the interplanetary society and as a member of the academy of astronautics, the royal astronomical society, and many other organizations.

He authored more than fifty books and won his numerous awards: the Kalinga prize of 1961, the American association for the advancement Westinghouse prize, the Bradford Washburn award, and the John W. Campbell award for his novel Rendezvous with Rama. Clarke also won the nebula award of the fiction of America in 1972, 1974 and 1979, the Hugo award of the world fiction convention in 1974 and 1980. In 1986, he stood as grand master of the fiction of America. The queen knighted him as the commander of the British Empire in 1989.

Reviews

[Brian Clegg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Surely there must be publishers kicking themselves that they didn’t republish Arthur C. Clarke’s vision of the future from 33 years earlier when 2019 came around. Of course, plenty of SF authors (and futurologists) have tried to imagine the future, but arguably Clarke was doubly qualified. Firstly, he had a big success in predicting geostationary satellites before they existed. And secondly his 2001, A Space Odyssey proved entertainingly far from the real world of the first year of the new millennium. Would an attempt at futurology rather than SF have the clarity of his satellite idea or the overreach of 2001?

As this book was long out of print, I ended up buying a used copy - from the cover photo I assumed it was a paperback, but in reality it's a large format hardback with colour photos throughout. In a sense this remains more science fiction than anything else. As Clarke himself admits in his introduction, any attempt at futurology can only ever be an 'inquiry into the limits of the possible'. Arguable some of what's in here was predictably impossible even back in 1986, but 'impossible' will always be a fuzzy term when dealing with the future.

The first real chapter focuses on the 1969 moon landing from a 2019 perspective - a 2019 with a 'Clavius City' moonbase, and with a historical look at a (fictional) 1993 speech by a US president, bemoaning the fact that there has been no significant progress in space exploration in the last 20 years. Clarke was not to realise this inertia would mostly last for a further 30 years. He goes on to cover a whole host of topics: healthcare, robots, school, transport, space station life, movies, sports, living spaces, work, psychiatry (bizarrely), the bedroom, death and war. You have to admire Clarke's reach - Alvin Toffler's 1970 megahit of the futurology genre, the extremely stodgy Future Shock, had nowhere near enough range (and Clarke's has pictures). It's going to make this a long review, so buckle up, but I think it's worth taking a look at most sections in some detail.

Clarke's vision of healthcare takes us to a hospital that is as much a community centre and hotel as a place to fix people who aren't well. He tells us that at one end there's an aerobics class, followed by a lecture on 'Eating your way to good health', while elsewhere two new parents share a candlelit dinner (shark and rice) as a group of elderly people watch the Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera. This is because it's a 'business with an eye to the bottom line' that is a 'place for the cultivation of wellness.' Clarke certainly captures the rising obsession amongst the chattering classes with 'wellness', but was clearly targeting a purely US market as he pairs a reduction of government funding for health with hospitals being forced to reevaluate their commercial role in society. This view was partly based on an idea that as medical technology gets better, we would need it far less, where in fact the opposite has held true - and seems almost to assume that those inconvenient poor people will have disappeared. In fact, he effectively says they will be denied expensive medical support, but doesn't follow through to the conclusion that they've been exterminated.

Robots are first introduced in the hospital chapter, where they take over the cheap labour work, as well as doing much of the surgery. But in the robotics chapter, we see them in everyday life. Clarke doesn't fall for the 1950s stereotype (or the portrayal in Star Wars). He tells us that a roboticized (sic) home won't have a robot butler or 'little androids scuttling around', but rather a 'small family of intelligent appliances'. In some aspects he's quite close to a modern smart home, including robot vacuum cleaners, though he does give us an unlikely (and unsavoury) vision of a combo fridge and microwave, which automatically heats a ready meal to be ready as you come through the door. Oddly, he imagines homes designed for robots with no clutter and perhaps just one room that humans have to clean themselves containing all their fripperies. It's all a bit cold, Arthur. Arguably the most advanced robots of the real 2019 and later are self-driving cars - but those don't appear.

Next comes education. This is lifelong, which is good of course, though you might raise an eyebrow that some of this is undertaken by a 'McSchool franchise'. Clarke rightly sees new technology requiring frequent retraining (though he falls for the idea that cropped up in the 1980s that there wouldn't be computer programmers as all programming would be done by computers). As with medicine, his vision is very much about the positives for the affluent and doesn't really address the problems for those who aren't in white collar work, nor how we get from the strongly embedded educational structures of the present to his totally different future. Much of his visions of education is through 'televideo instruction' - though we have come to recognise the benefits of blended work for some, there is little evidence that is effective in educating children. And I fear somewhat for Clarke's teachers. Apparently a typical school is based on an existing operation in Clarke's time, the Institute of Computer Technology in Sunnyvale, California (it doesn't seem to exist anymore), which was 'open from 8am to 10pm, six days a week, twelve months a year, with no extended vacations.' We are told that 'artificial intelligence, still in its infancy, will dominate the education system of 2019' - though Clarke didn't say how this would happen.

The travel section begins with an imagined itinerary, which includes a hovercraft, a couple of flights at around 4,000 miles per hour (even more unlikely in the real 2019 was the meal served on board which included veal scallopini or chicken teriyaki 'with complimentary choice of wines'), and rides on the 'California Magnetic Railroad' at around 300 mph. As far as cars go, electric was a no-no - he predicted enhanced petrol and diesel instead - and self-driving seem not to have occurred to him. On the plus side we have built-in satnav, though the maps had to be stored on video disk. At sea, one Clarke's big blunders was a predominance of hovercraft. Similarly, on non-hypersonic planes he oddly predicted the return of propellors. And, of course, he gives us plenty of 2001-style space travel in a way that never really happened. Just watch the movie - no need to go further with the space station chapter.

In entertainment, Clarke rightly saw HDTV threatening the movie theatres - though this was an earlier, CRT-based version of the concept - making cinemas respond with enhanced technology including IMAX. So far, so good, though inevitably some of the possibilities are stretched further than was realistically possible. Interestingly, he did correctly predict the widespread use of CGI, and the ability to produce computer-based versions of actors, though he thought audiences would be interested in a sequel to Gone With the Wind featuring AI versions of the original cast, or the ability to replace a character on TV with their own image. As was common at the time, he was enthusiastic about optical media (what would become DVDs) but totally missed the internet as a means of supplying entertainment (which is mostly passive - no mention of the bigger video game industry). He does give us satellite and fibre optic cable TV, but it's still broadcast rather than streaming.

Sport provides us with a reasonably accurate, if dull, assessment of the increase of use of knowledge, sports science and technology to improve sporting prowess, though this goes a bit far, with his basketball players, who are genetically enhanced to be ultra-tall and muscular. Similarly a little uninspiring, the living spaces section is really just more of the same from the robotics section, envisaging a smart house that, for example, can sense and influence moods. Clarke seems to realise it's a bit repetitive, so turns this section mostly into a piece of fiction about a man and his life with smart house, which begins with a house being accused of murder.

In the office, there are no human clerical and secretarial workers as this is all handled by computers - which, when compared with the kind of secretarial support common in the 1980s (when, for example, most managers still didn't know how to type and would ask for emails to be printed for them to read) has to a degree come true, though of course there are still plenty of people-facing clerical workers, for example in a call centre. More unlikely is the 'intelligence amplifier' which through a connected cap enables the imagined office worker to conjure up pseudo-visual images of AI helpers.

The psychiatry section is a waste of space, while the bedroom section is way out, envisaging many artificial brain stimulation techniques to enhance pleasure as well as partner robots. The death section gives us the real extension of life expectancy (presumably after Clarke had wiped out the short-living poor people), but goes too far, making 100+ a common expectation. Grave markers of 2019 sound dire: they 'contain video screens and tapes of the late lamented'.

The final 'war' section is interesting. Clarke did not foresee the downfall of the USSR, and gives us World War III in 2018. It begins with a workers' strike in East Germany. As this escalates, it results in NATO versus USSR action. Warfare mostly consists of tanks, aircraft and missiles, and is almost entirely directed against military targets. In the end, it effectively ends in a draw with lightly changed borders and no serious damage to the civilian population, though bridges and other infrastructure need replacing. Sadly, modern warfare (thankfully not on the world war scale yet) hasn't managed to be so selective.

It's definitely interesting stuff, and better than much of the futurology I've seen, though inevitably there are big gaps, notably most of our ICT, the environmental agenda and anything about politics. Clarke's view is purely one based on US culture, presumably thinking this would give him the biggest audience, though for a Brit living in Sri Lanka, you might have thought he could have given more of the bigger world picture. What it lacks (and arguably this was true of Future Shock too) is any real idea of life for the ordinary person in the street or any social conscience - it's a cold, hard view of the future for the elite. We may miss some of the high-tech wonders, but I prefer the real 2019 as it turned out, despite all its faults, to Clarke's vision.

As far as futurology goes, this book demonstrates clearly that the genre will never come close to science fiction's ability to play around with future possibilities and improbabilities in an entertaining way. SF is not about attempting to predict the future, it's about 'what if?' - and that will always be more interesting. You might argue this book was science fiction, but as such it could have been better.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

With the upcoming 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing, I thought that it might be fun to look at a book that, first published in 1987, tried to imagine what it would be like on July 20th 2019.

It is a coffee table book, in a large format, that is meant to impress. I love the cover art, created by Tim White, which shows a huge aircraft flying towards the reader whilst flying over a road which has futuristic cars and lorries speeding along it and a city in the distance.

In his introduction, Sir Arthur (although just 'Arthur' when this was written) suggests that his book is not a prediction but an Inquiry into the limits of the possible:

“… such inquiries can be extremely useful whether they take the form of SF or think-tank computer studies. Although SF requires no justification (as long as it’s well written), it does have great social value as an early warning system – something none of us who have survived the year 1984 is likely to forget.” (page 5)

The book is divided into fifteen broad-ranging chapters with an Epilog, on topics such as ‘A Day in the Hospital’, ‘A Day in the Life of a Robot’, ‘A Day at the Office’, ‘A Night at the Cinema’, ‘A Night in the Bedroom’ and even simpler, ‘War’. There are sixteen contributors who have contributed the text and 32 pages of black and white and colour photographs.

 

There are elements that have developed even more than our optimists of the 1980’s have predicted. The future of computing is an aspect that is beyond what they expected. What would they make of today’s mini-computer communication devices? It is wryly amusing to read of the excitement that the potential of home computers could bring – remember that this was three or four years before most people had the Internet and a PC.

So too is the night of the cinema. What would a person of 1987, if not 1969, make of the streamed 4K television, home surround sound and mega-screens of 2019? According to Sir Arthur’s book CDs and DVDs are the next big thing - which they were, up to about 2015. We should however be grateful that the gloom suggested by the demise of the cinema in favour of home cinema seems to have been delayed. Cinemas have kept a smaller yet still important place in today’s society.

Much of the book's chapters point out how important robotics will be in the world of 2019. From the perspective of 2019 robotics have perhaps exceeded beyond many of the suggestions here. Whilst walking robots and driverless cars are not quite part of everyday life in 2019 (close though!), the use of voice operated technology  are (thank you Siri and Alexa!) This importance of future robotics even extends to our sex lives, where the “bionic penises” proposed here in Chapter 13 have perhaps been *cough* enhanced by electronics. Whilst robotic sex toys are not quite as commonplace as this book would suggest in 2019, they are out there, so I understand.

As to the idea that poly-amorous relationships would be accepted as commonplace in 2019, this seems more like the ideals of the 1960’s transposed to the 21st century. In terms of gender and sexual fluidity we are getting there – in SF as well as other areas of society! - but the situation is currently far from that suggested here.

In medical care the robotic revolution has surely exceeded what is suggested here. Robot surgery is not quite there, although robot-assisted surgery is to the point where brain surgery and heart transplants are becoming routine.
Interestingly, what seems rather far-fetched in 1987 has also come to pass. Whilst we still need to improve mental health and well-being (both considered to be significantly important in the future) it is also envisaged that hospitals will be “corporate structures”. If I was reading this in 1987, I would have been amazed at some of these suggestions. As a child of Britain’s NHS. I would have found that idea of the hospital as a business asset silly and abhorrent. From the present 2019, I see that most of that proposed is (sadly) right.

The use of home computers and the role of computers in school (Chapter 5) and the office (Chapter 11) seem vastly underrated here. Whilst the book suggests that home learning will be commonplace, the emphasis is on computer occupations – coding and the like – rather than the pervasive presence it has become. In the office the robot secretary has stayed as an SF trope although the use of diaries on our laptops and mobile devices is common.

In terms of transport (Chapter 6) we are nearly at the point where automated driverless transport is possible, but there are missteps here. The suggestion that most sea transport will be by submarine seems sensible yet unlikely. Aeroplanes seem to have got to their maximum size potential whilst the opportunities offered by supersonic travel and the ram jet appear unrealised.

Where we haven’t made the expected progress most is in things like human space exploration. The first chapter is an imaginary letter written by Sir Arthur, now over one hundred years old but taking advantage of living with over 1000 other people on the Moon as a way of extending life. It is typically optimistic, and is echoed in the second chapter by an essay stating why humans should return to space, written by a historian in 2019 looking back. Interestingly, this chapter doesn’t just focus on the science and technology but makes the point that 1969 was a year of social and cultural change as well.

Whilst I enjoyed reading about how close and how far apart the projections are. So, what then of the future? How did people in 1987 see this world of 2019? And how much did they get right?

Well, the good news is that we’ve not managed to kill each other off through nuclear war, something that Sir Arthur would have been pleased about, even though Chapter 15 points out that we had World War III start in East Germany in 2018. The war of the future is (surprise surprise!) robotic, with tanks driven and major decisions made by a soldier miles away from the battlefield. There’s no mention of terrorism though, which may surprise today’s modern reader. As ever, it is surprising how good we are at inventing ways to kill each other.

In summary, this was an interesting read which, as the editor Arthur C. Clarke has said, is not an accurate predictor of the future but nevertheless an interesting excursion into the possibilities of what could have been. There is something comforting about reading such a book as this, to see where we have progressed - but, at the same time, to see where we haven't. I enjoyed reading it a great deal, as a good effort to show us what the brave new world of 2019 will be like. 50 years beyond the first Moon landing, it's an interesting place to visit.

[Dragon Is In Her Book Cave · Rating 2 out of 5]

I did not know "July 20, 2019" existed until, well, July 20, 2019. One of my coworkers put this book on display at the library, and today at work I nabbed it off the shelf (where not a single patron even spared a glance at it. Naturally, my maternal librarian instincts kicked in, and I was forced to rescue this poor, overlooked, outcast book from an inevitable death by dust bunnies.) I have worked at this library for 8 years, and I never once knew it was in our collection. Which is odd, because I usually seek out weird shit like this. Also, it was last checked out in 1996.
Anyway, I brought this book home and leafed through this strange little vision of today (or what was then the future when this book was published in 1986). Never before have I been more thoroughly entertained, bemused, and horrified, a bizarre potpourri of emotions if there ever was one. It was like watching a subpar Futurama episode written in the 1980s.
This book has a lot of problems. White straight men, like the author, have a luxury in envisioning the future. Their future is baseball players with bionic arms, Hollywood resurrecting Marilyn Monroe's body and voice through the miracle of computer technology, robo-dogs, and of course simply mind-blowing zero gravity coitus (yes, this is all in the book). The future is rosy, alluring, and mostly an exciting make-believe game to play in the mind. It's not so much that Clarke's predictions are erroneous (some speculations are actually rather insightful and have indeed come to pass) but that he cannot - does not - envision a future that is better for women, people of color, indigenous people, queer people, disabled people, or anyone who is not a white, heterosexual male. This is a future written by the white straight male, and that comes through potently in this book's pages. The future belongs not to him and other white men but to all of the rest of us. We are writing it, and envisioning it, and creating it.
Despite its faults, this book was worth my perusal, I suppose, mostly for lines like this: "The best sex in 2019 probably won't be found on Earth. It will happen three hundred miles in space. The most romantic hotel in the universe will be found orbiting the Earth, perhaps taking the form of a commercial wing on NASA's permanent space station, and you'll be able literally to bounce off the walls with your partner." Who knew space was so sexy (with the exception of Barbarella). There's nothing more erotic than potential death via the vacuum of space.
Mostly I'm just happy I got to read a book called "July 20, 2019" on July 20, 2019. This made the geek nook of my brain explode with giddy, bookwork joy. I will probably never get to do this again, unless someone knows a title with an exact date, say, in the next 80 years or so.

[Jim Razinha · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this in an antique store a couple of months ago and as I’d never seen a copy before, nor expect to again, I bought it. Published in 1986, it is Clarke’s vision of what life in the 21st century would be like. Being Clarke, one would assume that the predictions were more educated than not, but quite a bit of this is fanciful wishful thinking. Right off the bat, the Introduction is a Letter from a Lunar Inhabitant. That humans haven’t “set foot” outside of low Earth orbit since 1972 certainly would have surprised the 1986 Clarke, as might some of his “hits” and probably more of his “misses”. I like looking at (smart) predictions and seeing how close we are. That this is only one year past Clarke’s target is a great perspective. Ray Kurzweil made many predictions in several books and some worked, some didn’t (though he was quite generous to himself in each subsequent book as to how well his turned out). Some of Clarke’s may be 50 to 100 years more from now to fruition. Or maybe 20. Who knows?

Clarke looked at medicine, robotics, education, transportation, a space station, entertainment (movies), sports, home automation, changes to an office environment, psychiatry, life extension and war. Technology is hard to predict 33 years in the future, even for Clarke. He was locked into the tech of the day for data storage - optical discs - which haven’t kept up with solid state multi terabyte storage systems. And I am not sure why he mentioned several times that people could be traveling at Mach 22. And as with his later fiction, he is weakest when it comes to social interactions. And wildly off the mark on performance enhancing sports through chemical and bionic means. Spot on for using computers to analyze and help train, but ixnay of the hormones.

Some of the ideas he floated are in place or in development today, but not ubiquitous. Home automation is a thing, just not most places, and Alexa may have some AI and capabilities, but “she” isn’t close to semi-sentient. He pretty much nailed the price of a movie ticket, if not the experience, but he did note that the content of entertainment wouldn’t change much. (I won’t tell him about “reality” television if you won’t {wink}.) Hugely optimistic with respect to psychiatry - most things should be an easy fix with all kinds of designer (he doesn’t call the that) drugs, right? Psychiatry may have progressed the least of his examinations - but it’s a fuzzy science at best so that is understandable. And war...well, he can’t be blamed for overestimating the use and impact of tanks.

“In spite of the emphasis on longevity, death in the 21st century is no longer a dirty word.” Statements like this pervade and there is no way Clarke, much like the Enlightenment Framers, could anticipate a recoil from science, the retrogressive social march, the exultation of ignorance that roadblocks any progress (which unlike Clarke’s “death”, is a dirty word, at least among the backwards population.)

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

An intriguing book which I'd deliberately put aside so that I could be about half-way through it on the titular date. Not speculative fiction, but rather a series of speculative essays on how life might be expected to be lived in 2019, as seen from the mid- to late- 1980s. The book is listed as being edited by Clarke with work by some dozen or more contributors, but it is often difficult to tell how much of the writing is the contributors' and how much is Clarke's own.

As might be expected from a book of future speculation there are direct hits, wildly optimistic targets which were not met and underestimations which have been greatly surpassed. Mush of the interest lies in seeing how this possible now could have looked and how plausibly our own reality has shifted from the path suggested in the book. In some aspects, the suggested 2019 is still one which might be envisaged in the not too distant future; in others we are already way past the speculation. It is perhaps ironic that, with Clarke being the visionary who foresaw satellite telecommunications, it is in this field that the book was least accurate. In 1987, when the book was written, the internet was in its infancy and the World Wide Web was a mere lightbulb moment hanging over Tim Berners-Lee's head. The possible future of sex freed from stigma, charted journeys through pinpoint-accurate drug psychedelia, and legal performance-enhanced sports are probably still just pipe-dreams (or pipe-nightmares if you prefer), but several of the sections such as those on hospital and school routines, seem not that far from our reality.

It should be continuously remembered that this is NOT a book of prophecies and predictions, but rather speculation based on cutting-edge research in the 1980s and extrapolation from data. The geopolitical changes which occurred with the fall of the Soviet Union, and all the downstream collateral from it, would have been seen as very unlikely at the time of the book's writing, as too would many of the other social trends and political changes which have occurred in the last 32 years. As such, the book was never going to be (and was never intended as) an attempt to describe the future - rather it was a suggestion of what might happen. And it is fascinating to examine this alternative 2019 from that viewpoint.

As far as the book itself is concerned in other ways, it is a handsome tome, with writing which is easily accessible without stinting on the science (as, indeed, should be expected by anyone who has ever read much Clarke). The text is broken down into easily digested sections, each detailing daily life through one of its aspects: life at home, at school, at work, travelling, in space, etc., etc., etc. Perhaps one point in which it does fail is the dated (even dated for 1987 - it feels more like early 1970s) photographic illustrations, which detract rather than adding to the text. What images there should be should at leat relate to, and hopefully enhance, the reading, but these do the opposite. Often they seem to have been grabbed at random from industrial catalogues and stock photography sites.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Arthur C. Clarke's works are invariably a safe bet, even when exploring his 1980s predictions about life in 2019.

I stumbled upon this book in my storage in the summer of 2019 (I know, what are the odds), and over the next four years, I gradually savored its contents, finding substantial enjoyment in it. Now, did Clarke get everything right about 2019? Hell no, of course. Yes, some parts are uncannily on point (the Epilogue, discussing the future of the UN and the problems of dispute resolutions, states that "it should not be difficult to write a program that could act as an 'honest broker' between parties in a dispute", which although is not something that happened in 2019, is very much something close to becoming a reality here in 2024, when I'm writing this review and looking at the onslaught of various LLMs), but others are so hilariously wrong, it's hard to believe he would even go there (I'm looking at you, chapters on sports and psychiatry... as well as the same Epilogue, which boldly proclaims that by 2019 the number of independent states would drop sharply from 159 the UN had in the 1980s... yet today we have nearly 200). Yet critiquing these inaccuracies misses the point--after all, all he did is take the trajectory the world was on in the 1980s, add a dash of healthy speculation, and extrapolate where it would lead to in 2019, if things continue more or less unchanged. And that, of course, is where the challenge with forecasting the future always lies--you can speculate and estimate all you want (and even land a lot, if, like Clarke, you're very good at this), but you'll never land there exactly because the farther into the future you look, the more likely it is that you'll miss some major development which will shift the trajectory into a completely different direction. There was, for example, some basic networking in the 1980s, but predicting the Internet, and especially what it would ultimately become, would've been, if not impossible, definitely in the area of wild speculation. The fall of the Soviet Union had still been a wild fantasy up to a point when it actually happened; no way anyone could have predicted it with any confidence. And any predictions about the future of AI, even when they land amazingly close to today's reality, were based on the naive 1980s assumptions, so whatever accuracy is there was more of a coincidence than foresight.

But don't take these misses too seriously. After all, even when Clarke is dead wrong, the book is still a captivating romp along the thought processes of forty years ago. And who knows, much of it might yet materialize--after all, 2019 was just the beginning of the century he envisioned.

[Ross Vincent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Science Fiction Giant Arthur C Clarke wrote this book back in the early 80's; in it, he made "predictions" of what life would be like on July 20, 2019.

Today.

Well, he was off on a few things. There was no WWIII; instead, we have the War on Terror, again Non-Nation enemies. There are no radical ideas on death and living past 100 - human race recognizes that death is going to happen. There are no wild medical practices for health, sexuality and mental health. The ideas of living in space is still a dream - very few people get to spend time in LOE, let alone permanent inhabitants of Nursing Homes on the Moon or Apartment communities in orbit. And Sports -well, I glossed over that part. #NotASportsFan
But the idea of Smart Homes seems to be pretty close - we have robot vacuums, we have devices in our homes that allow us to control our environment, with just a few words, as well as a primative AI component #YesAlexaIAmTalkingAboutYou.. And move to make homes greener is more than a pipe dream.
Finally, he was pretty close on the idea of education - we can learn from the comfort of our home, with internet courses and other online means of education.

But really, this is sci-fi, with the homes of it being scientific speculation that comes true.

[Abraham Revilla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Toda una visión, nada alejada de la realidad, de lo que nos depara el futuro (ya no tan lejano) y, considerando que el libro se escribió en 1987, muchas cosas que vienen ahí ya se han cumplido. ¡Me encantó!

[Laura Latinski · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this book. I read it when I was a teenager, and have always planned to read it on the exact date. Many of his predictions did come true, and many did not. It's a great mix of bitter pessimism and almost childlike optimism and everything in between.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s a little crazy to read this book on this day. Some of it is hilariously wrong, but he got more right than you’d expect.

[Jose Torroja Ribera · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muy interesante, pero las cosas no han ido tan rápido como Clarke creía.

[Dan Kert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal! Such a great collection of futuristic predictions!

[Darilaros · Rating 5 out of 5]

In case anyone is wondering, yes I did begin reading this on the actual date of July 20, 2019. I'd bought it a year or so before because how could I not!

[Artur Coelho · Rating 3 out of 5]

É sempre interessante revisitar estes textos futuristas, evitando sempre o tom condescendente na leitura. É claro que as predições não se concretizaram, este tipo de textos são extrapolativos e especulativos, não oráculos, e mostram-nos muito sobre as ânsias e esperanças do tempo passado. Apesar de não serem preditivos, são interessantes na forma como identificaram tendências de evolução tecnológica e social que, embora não se concretizando de forma linear, se fazem sentir no nosso mundo contemporâneo. Neste que é o real futuro, percebemos ao ler textos especulativos informados do passado que muito do que fazemos hoje já era preocupação nesses tempos.

As especulações de Clarke são informadas, baseadas em análises e entrevistas com especialistas. Olha para a robótica, antevendo um futuro próximo em que os humanos poderão livrar-se do trabalho manual, entregue a robots. Imagina redes de transporte rápidas e eficazes, combinando aeronaves supersónicas, comboios de alta velocidade e hovercrafts para deslocação rápida e barata para qualquer parte do planeta. Na saúde, cruza o desenvolvimento tecnologico e da ciência médica com uma visão muito benévola da medicina privada (ah, a inocência), enquanto na educação extrapola, e muito bem, a necessidade de sistemas de formação ao longo da vida para cidadãos que terão de se atualizar, bem como a vontade de aprender mais. A sociedade informatizada em que vivemos é vislumbrada, por vezes em pormenores curiosamente certeiros - o uso de IA para advocacia ou sistemas automáticos para saúde mental são dois exemplos, mas Clarke não prestou atenção ao potencial da então nascente internet, e extrapolou futuros de telefones por vídeo e cassetes VHS. Não podia falta um capítulo sobre guerra, que me pareceu algo decalcado de The Third World War de John Hackett, e daí o conceito que retirei foi a visão da imutabilidade futura de um mundo dividido entre dois blocos, o ocidental e o soviético.

Nestes dias de um futuro distópico, em que sentimos as liberdades e garantias a resvalar sob pressão de conservadorismo radical, em que a promessa libertária da internet foi esmagada pelas grandes empresas para construir o que é pouco mais do que uma máquina global de extração de dados que vicia os utilzadores, perante o quadro grave dos efeitos das alterações climáticas e o resvalar do mundo geopolítico para um sistema de autocracias e novos totalitarismos, o mais refrescante destas leituras é o seu lado de inabalável otimismo. Qualquer que fosse a extrapolação, é patente a fé de Clarke num futuro melhor, numa ideia que o progresso era imparável e nos iria melhorar, enquanto sociedade e ao nível individual. Essa promesa, sente-se o quão longe está de ser cumprida.

[Connie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book that was interesting the first time I read it, when it was new in 1986. Rediscovered it on my bookshelf and decided I would read it the week before 7/20/2019. Finishing it today, the date of the book, there were many more misses than hits. No cell phones or much internet discussed even though they were already in their infancy. He has full blown WWIII in Europe with the USSR as the aggressor, but no middle east wars. Overall an interesting read of what someone thought the world would look like 50 years after the moon landing, even if it's not much what things look like at all. But he never did predict flying cars.

[Michael Roman · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fun coffee table book...man, the future had so much potential.