' A CENTURY OF TOMORROWS ' : BOOK REVIEW

A Century of Tomorrows : How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present. By Glenn Adamson. '' Those unstoppable predictions of what's to come.''

What is futurology anyway? Attributed to the 1940s-era political scientist Ossip Flechtheim, the word conjures vague thoughts of swirling crystal balls and Faith popcorn, the marketing consultants who popularized the term '' cocooning. ''

[ She's a figure of scorn here, her pronouncements '' trite, impossible to validate statistically and certainly open to challenge.'' ]

Futurology is not to be confused with Futurism, the Italian avant-garde movement started in the early 1900s by a poet who thought libraries and pasta were dragging everybody down.

Adamson defines it broadly as the practice of predicting what's going to happen to society over an extended time, using any form, from science fiction to actuarial tables. By his lights Ridley Scott, Octavia Butler, Frank Lloyd Wright, Shulamith Firestone and Sun Ra all qualify as futurologists.

Nate Silver and Elon Musk surely do, too, after their fashion, but Adamson ends his study at 2000, the Gregorian number imagined as the epitome of the Future for so long - from at least Edward Beliamy's 1888 novel, '' Looking backward,'' all the way up to Y2K panic - that its eventual arrival was anticlimactic.

Soothsayers have been around since the ancients. But Adamson, a historian and curator who has worked as the head of research at the Victoria and Albert Museum tells of how prediction became a big business.

He begins with the commercialization of the tarot deck in 1909 by a London publishing firm, cards designed by Pamela Colman ''Pixie'' Smith that are still used today. 

He describes the rise of color forecasting - think ''millennial pink'' and '' brat green'' - which at one point included an adviser to the U.S. government suggesting that the red, white and blue of the flag be standardized.

He takes us back to the dawn of personal computing, how the so-called Mother of All Demos, by Doug Engelbart of the Augmentation Research Center in 1968 seeded today's reality, an Apple in every palm, intended to go rotten and be replaced within a few years.

The World Students Society thanks Alexandra Jacobs.