The Reader's Shelf: Future Shock: Reading in the New Year, January 2011 

The new year is certain to bring more great reading as January alone offers us Colm Toíbín and Brian Greene. As you make your to-be-read lists, take a moment to consider the future as projected by fiction and nonfiction of the past—be that past a century ago or last year. Whether technology means metaphorical desires humans increasingly cannot contain, or we will one day eat nothing but soy products and zip around in flying cars, these books explore what the future might be, or, in some cases, imagine what it might have been.

Some of the most fascinating views of the future are those built on failed inventions of the past. In steampunk fiction, this happens most often with technology that our current culture has passed by but could have, if innovation had taken a different turn, ruled our world. Dexter Palmer delights in such speculations in his sly and lyrical The Dream of Perpetual Motion (St. Martin’s. 2010. ISBN 9780312558154. $24.99). This beautifully crafted novel revolves around Harold Winslow, imprisoned in a zeppelin and writing his memoir. Present in Harold’s life is the voice of his only love, Miranda Taligent, and that of her genius-inventor father. Palmer’s use of overlapping stories, time jumps, and excerpts from notebooks, diaries, and newspapers creates a richly layered and lushly imagined world.

While steampunk writers imagine a kind of future-past, H.G. Wells future-cast in The Time Machine (Everyman’s Library. 2010. ISBN 9780307593849. $27.50). Published in 1895, it is an ancestor of most prognosticating fiction. The main character is an unnamed English scientist who invents a time machine. He travels forward thousands of years and encounters the Eloi, a small childlike race who are hunted by the Morlocks, a larger, light-fearing race. The Morlocks steal the traveler’s machine, forcing a deadly confrontation that ultimately leads to the traveler jumping to an even more distant time where he witnesses the end of the earth. Wells’s involving short novel suggests many themes, for instance, the evolution of technology and man, that are touch points in the ongoing consideration of the future.

Kage Baker’s “The Company” series began with the stellar In the Garden of Iden (Tor. 2005. ISBN 9780765314574. pap. $14.95). In 16th-century Spain, Mendoza is rescued from the Inquisition by the cyborg Joseph, a member of the 24th-century organization known as the Company. Seemingly charged with preserving rare items from history, the Company’s founder raids the past for profit in the future. In exchange for her life, Mendoza becomes a cyborg and is trained in a special facility as a botanist before being re­introduced to her own time to protect and preserve what otherwise would be lost. For her first mission, she is sent to the garden of Sir Walter Iden, where she finds not just a rare plant but also a romantic complication. Mendoza soon understands just what preserving the future will cost her.

J.D. Robb (aka Nora Roberts) has been inventing the future for years in her romantic suspense police procedural series featuring Lt. Eve Dallas. Set 40 decades from now, Eve’s world is filled with flying cars, auto-chefs, and holodecks. Counterbalancing this ease is the loss, to all but the super wealthy, of any food not made of soy, print books, and most personal privacy. Since the series builds on past events, it is best to start with the first book, Naked in Death (Berkley: Penguin Group [USA]. 1995. ISBN 9780425148297. pap. $7.99), which introduces the tough-as-nails but damaged Eve and Roarke, a fabulously wealthy and mostly legitimate business tycoon. As she tracks down a serial killer, Roarke plots to get the by-the-book Eve to see him as more than a suspect.

In sharp, accessible prose with a strong narrative edge, Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us (Picador. ISBN 9780312427900. pap. $15), casts his eyes forward to imagine our world without humans. Most of what we have made falls to ruin, covered by plant life and inhabited by animals now free to recover and thrive. Within days, the New York City subway tunnels flood, and mice and other animals clean plates left on our tables. Society’s infrastructure takes longer to deteriorate. Sand dunes overtake houses near the ocean, the roots of trees and flowers rip apart pavement and roads. Longest surviving human-made creations? Bronze and plastic, both of which remain for centuries.

Wired magazine founder Kevin Kelly looks at the evolving future in What Technology Wants (Viking. 2010. ISBN 9780670022151. $27.95), exploring how the “technium” (the breadth of technology that includes not just cell phones and iPads but paintings and music) advances over time via a quasi-evolutionary function. He argues that technology is not so much random invention as a chain of inevitable outcomes that humans are increasingly at a loss to direct. Kelly frames his central question with a series of beautifully conceived explorations (Amish hackers, the Unabomber, infinite games). His discursive style and multiple side trips create a fascinating weave that draws readers into the rambling construction of his larger argument and holds them there—­either spellbound or unsettled or maybe both.