"An Optimist’s Tour of the Future," by Mark Stevenson (Avery, 384 pp.)
Writer, comedian, and learning-enthusiast Mark Stevenson is not a scientist. He’s just an ordinary forward-thinking British bloke with a lot of questions. In An Optimist’s Tour of the Future the lucky layman travels the world to ask its brightest people: “What’s next”?
He meets the Harvard professor who launched the Human Genome Project; a couple of roboticists and their talking, thinking machines; and the “inventor” of nanotechnology. He visits a pair of Australian farmers who plan to redefine agriculture and stave off climate change at the same time. He joins the president of the Maldives for a cabinet meeting 20 feet underwater.
Stevenson describes our future’s possibilities with a journalist’s eye for detail, a teacher’s knack for translating complexities, and a comic’s wry commentary. He neatly divides the book into four sections – Man, Machine, Mother Earth, and Me – but his internal conclusions aren’t as simple. “The way I think and reason is in thrall to a world that is passing,” he realizes. In the end, it is up to readers to decide if they will adopt the author’s ultimately hopeful state of mind when imagining the years to come.
