Shelfies #58: Richard Watson

Here is my rather curated selection of books. It's curated in the sense that these books would never sit together on a shelf like this. I generally have my books arranged by theme, so old books about the future on one shelf (2020 and 2025 forecasts are funny to read now), novels, biographies, and books about gardening on other shelves. Read this shelf from left to right and focus on the first five.

I have no idea where The Usborne Book of the Future came from. Most probably eBay.

I bought it ten years ago and it cost a small fortune. I’m not kidding. I think I paid £100 for it. They became so valuable for a while that the publisher re-issued the book a few years ago, so its value has now taken a nosedive. What I love about this book is its general optimism, but also the way it gives you two views of the same thing. So, with cities you get a dystopian view of a future city alongside a utopian scenario. One looks like Singapore, while the other looks a bit like parts of Donetsk in Ukraine right now.  My copy was published in 1979, and I guess it’s thinking about what the world would look like around the year 2000. It was very much the inspiration for The Children’s Book of the Future, which I co-wrote with Lavie Tidhar a few years ago.

2011: Living in the Future is a wonderful book that I’ve also had for ages. First published in 1972, it also looks toward the 2000s and is spookily accurate (think tablets, online shopping, electric vehicles and online learning). The author, Geoffrey Hoyle, is the son of Fred Hoyle, the famous astronomer. What I love about this book is the illustrations and especially that, alongside the many accurate predictions about 2011, the fashion is somehow stuck in 1972 (think afros and jumpsuits).

Next, something a bit different. A book that is timely and needs far more recognition.

An Improbable Friendship by Anthony David is about the friendship between Moshe Dayan’s wife and Yasser Arafat’s mother-in-law. You really couldn’t make this up. A useful primer on the history of Israel too.

Future Shock from 1970. I really like books about what the future might be like that were written years ago (the longer the better in fact). I have a few from the late 1800s and quite a number from around the time of HG Wells and Jules Verne. Future Shock describes the way in which the perception of too much change over too short a period would create anxiety and insecurity. It perfectly describes 2025 in many ways.

Finally, The AI Mirror, by Shannon Vallor is the best of many books I’ve read about AI. It describes the way AI reflects who we are, the reflection pointing backwards rather than forwards, and asks that we demand more of both AI and ourselves in the future.

Richard is a specialist in futures thinking, foresight, technology futures, scenarios, innovation, and extreme risks. He has worked as Futurist-in-Residence at both the Entrepreneurship Centre at the Judge School at Cambridge University and the Technology Foresight Practice at Imperial College London. He is the author of ten books including; Digital Vs. Human, Future Files, Future Minds, Future Vision, The Future: 50 Ideas You Really Need to Know and The Children’s Book of the Future. He has also contributed chapters to several other books including The Love Makers, After Shock and Future Frontiers: Education for an AI World. 

Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin.
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