The future summarised

I’ve been meaning to blog this for ages. I’ve been subscribing for a few years to a ‘monthly abstract of books, articles and reports concerning forecasts, trends and ideas about the future’ from a serious-minded (but appropriately kookie) outfit called The World Future Society. Future Survey is a dreary-looking two-column newsletter with a slightly cheesy ‘futuristic’ 1970s masthead design, no colour, no editorial, no ads and no illustrations – just capsule synopses of books, magazine articles and TV programmes about the future. It ought to be pretty dry (the kind of thing you used to find right at the back of your University Library until they wised up and stopped buying the stuff nobody read) but editor Michael Marien somehow makes it pithy and entertaining. Really, this is one of those marginal publications that really makes me glad – a labour of love and a fantastically useful resource that hardly anyone knows about.

1 comment

  1. It’s quite amazing isn’t it. I got it for a year, but all too often found I didn’t get round to reading the thing, never mind reading all the books it made me want to read. But the amount of *stuff* condensed into each flimsy issue… very obsessive and impressive.

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