All the Wonder That Would Be: Exploring Past Notions of the Future

by Stephen Webb

It has been argued that science fiction (SF) gives a kind of weather forecast - not the telling of a fortune but rather the rough feeling of what the future might be like. The intention in this audiobook is to consider some of these bygone forecasts made by SF and to use this as a prism through which to view current developments in science and technology.

In each of the ten main chapters - dealing in turn with antigravity, space travel, aliens, time travel, the nature of reality, invisibility, robots, means of transportation, augmentation of the human body, and, last but not least, mad scientists - common assumptions once made by the SF community about how the future would turn out are compared with our modern understanding of various scientific phenomena and, in some cases, with the industrial scaling of computational and technological breakthroughs.

A further intention is to explain how the predictions and expectations of SF were rooted in the scientific orthodoxy of their day, and use this to explore how our scientific understanding of various topics has developed over time, as well as to demonstrate how the ideas popularized in SF subsequently influenced working scientists.

Genres: Science Fiction, Physics

Audible Audio

Published May 11, 2021

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Melinda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating and so well researched. Loved the concept and the delivery.

[Paul · Rating 1 out of 5]

I thought it might analyse the reason behind the kinds of future that are imagined at different times in history but instead it's a mostly personal reminiscence of cool stories the author read. I like his taste so it wasn't that painful to read through but honestly there's very little of value here.