In Plan 9 From Outer Space, Ed Wood droned, “We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.” This weekend, the 5th annual Golden Plains music festival features an inaugural keynote address by noted futurist Dr Peter Ellyard, self-confessed optimist and author of Designing 2050. And so it is in a spirit of optimism that we have gathered together some web links that point to the best of recent writing on the web about the future, particularly as it relates to books, writing and ideas.
Here’s a piece imagining the writer of the future. Here’s another, a longer, more serious essay entitled ‘In the Age of Screens’. February saw the publication in the US of a book called The Late American Novel, in which writers speculate on the future of fiction - here’s a short review, here’s the introduction and here’s an excerpt. Also last month was an excellent article in Brain Pickings gathering together some of the recent trends in publishing and touching on the publication on a new book by John Thompson, Merchants of Culture, which takes a big-picture view on publishing and its future. We at the Dailies have visited the future only recently.
And what better way to end our visit to the future than with another of Ed Wood’s incantations: “And remember, my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future.”