Histories of the Future

“An eclectic, provocative mix of ideas and approaches united by their common intelligence and lucidity, the essays in Daniel Rosenberg’s and Susan Harding’s Histories of the Future tease out unexpected adjacencies between a welter of social, political, and cultural scenarios that touch on questions of the yet-to-come. This is a book that should be read by anyone with an interest in the relationship of the future to the past-and of the present to both.”-Jeffrey Kastner, senior editor of Cabinet magazine

“Telling of timelines to the end of time and boom times for imagining the future, this fine book is a boon for all of us who tune in for such timely discourses. Astute essays-and a chancy global futures card game-take the reader from salvage frontiers in South Kalimantan; to desert folk futurologies in Rachel, Nevada, and lived surreal cityscapes in Irvine, California; to fraught future makings through art, technology, and social movements in the Philippines and Japan; to that end-of-the millennium portal, Heaven’s Gate. Histories of the Future experiments with topic, genre, and mode. Its own narratives of the metastasizing metanarratives of late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century future making are at home in trauma time, everyday time, Big Time, prophecy time, local nonstandard time, and global time. Asking how to examine grand stories with local acts, this valuable collection makes palpable the rich collaborative thinking that bound the authors as they studied the shapes of futures already lost and futures still imaginable. We never get Big Stories out of place; rather, Histories of the Future gives us robust places, artifacts, practices, texts, and performances in which narrative control of possible futures is at stake.”-Donna J. Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz