20th century future-think: The future is not what it used to be

• Published in: Futures Vol. 25; no. 7; pp. 792 - 800
• Main Author: Clarke, I.F.
• Format: Book Review Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Elsevier Ltd 1993; Elsevier Science Ltd
• Subjects: 20th century; History; Impacts; Morality; Perceptions; Social conditions & trends; Technological change; War
• ISSN: 0016-3287; 1873-6378
• DOI: 10.1016/0016-3287(93)90025-O

I.F. Clarke returns to the second and final part of his present series on the ndevelopment of modern practice in thinking about the future. He takes the title for this article from an essay by Paul Valéry in the 1920s, because the greatest French poet of his day was one of the first to note the far-reaching ways in which World War I changed long-established ideas and cherished expectations. Four years of unprecedented fighting and the extraordinary triumphs of the new military technologies—tanks, bombing planes, poison gas, submarines—had ended the old romance between science and society. After 1918 the future appeared more dangerous, more difficult and far more problematical than it had seemed to those who had known the old certainties of fault-free progress. Out of those difficulties and uncertainties came a powerful drive to see the shapes of coming things as they might be. That was the point of departure for new modes of communication. We begin with the new futuristic fiction that set the alarm bells ringing in the 1920s.