Histories of the Future (review)

If there is one thing certain in the atomic age, it is that the future is uncertain. While artists, scientists, engineers and (dare I say it) politicians are busy defining and redefining the limits of culture and society, Histories of the Future takes a moment to reflect on some of the more colorful fruits that have been left in the collective wake of progressive activity during the last half of the 20th century. This could easily have been a straight chronicle of popular utopian fetishes (time travel, aliens, computers, cyborgs). While it certainly addresses these topics, it does not stop there. Rather, it tidies up the fuzzy edges surrounding some of the more obscure historical events—from nuclear testing to the Heaven's Gate cult—and gives them neat little pedestals on which to sit in their respective places in the halls of history.

Stemming from a research workshop that first took place at University of California, Irvine in 1997, the contributors to this volume, consisting mainly of anthropologists and historians, formulated a cultural conversation in the shadows of the American western frontier—an area that harbors many of the strange and unique things that define the United States. After several subsequent meetings, workshop participants were left to formulate their own ideas as they saw fit. Some stuck with American history; others stemmed out to

explore histories in other areas of the globe—futurism and the city in Tokyo; futurism, surrealism and food in Europe; cell phones and revolution in the Philippines; and resource frontiers in Indonesia. The volume as a whole manages to cover a satisfying range of subjects in the wide net it casts. There is enough in it to indulge the interests of individuals ranging from New Deal historians to die-hard science-fiction fans.

Throughout the volume, a certain frequency of anxiety is continually channeled, befitting the unknown. The book opens with a vibrant picture of American excess in a small corner of the Nevada desert in the early years of the Cold War, with a pulsing palette ranging from nuclear power to Liberace. Throughout the volume, essays continuously scan the range of progressive impulses, from millenarian to utopian to technological to spiritual—all with a similar intention of gauging the often-minute measurements between expectation and results. "How to Make Resources in Order to Destroy Them (and Then Save Them?) on the Salvage Frontier," by Anna Tsing, illustrates the spirit of the volume by discussing the making of a resource frontier in Indonesia in the 1990s in the face of globalization and the otherwise overwhelming burden of supply-and-demand economics. In it she discusses how the turbulence implicit in the activity on a frontier—in this case, the foraging of natural resources—both confuses and defines an industry's operations. The prospect of profit—whether economic or spiritual—invites a wide range of participants who invariably become involved in a tangled web of cooperation and deceit, with little regard to sustainability.

In between the essays are "interludes" that stray from the straight essay style—including a game, a fiction piece, a manifesto and a timeline of timelines. "Global Futures: The Game" is not designed to produce winners and losers; rather it is a forum for players to test their knowledge of world events and to stretch their imaginations at the same time by proposing how to reshape those events into many viable, alternative futures. "Access Fantasy: A Story," by Jonathan Lethem, is set in a traffic jam with no conceivable beginning or end, in an undefined urban area in which a novice sleuth makes his way through the world of subversive advertising in search of clues to link a suspected murder to the owner of a highly coveted apartment in his fantasy realtor video tape. The world animated in this fiction piece, though otherwise fantastical, is not so far removed from our...