What the Future Held

Making predictions isn't like peering into a crystal ball. It more often resembles looking in a mirror. Futurologists see in their visions the anxieties of their own time.

- KATRINA GULLIVER

IN THE YEAR 2000, people will get around with personal flying suits and have food brought to them by pneumatic tube. That's the kind of vision of tomorrow that was being presented a century earlier. The future was coming, and it would be magical. Techno optimism, with a dash of fantasy.

By the late 20th century, the future boosters were competing with doomers, who warned of overpopulation, environmental catastrophe, nuclear war. The future was coming all right, and you might not like it.

In "A Century of Tomorrows," Glenn Adamson, a cultural historian and the author of "Fewer, Better Things" (2018) offers a sweeping survey of future predictions, from 19th-century science fiction to Grace Jones at Studio 54. As Mr. Adamson describes it, futurology is growing in importance. "The increasing legitimacy of futurology is one of modernity's defining features: In an era of acceleration, when the future seems to arrive faster and faster, technical and scientific means have been deployed both in the service of that acceleration and in an attempt to predict its course." But, depending on how you define it, futurology has always been important. In the ancient world, emperors would turn to their haruspex to predict the outcome of a battle. Shamans would be consulted for their visions of what lay ahead.

Mysticism has long been interwoven with "scientific" futurology. Mr. Adamson demonstrates this with a story about tarot cards. The modern deck, with which most of us are familiar, was created in 1909. Far from a lingering remnant of medieval culture, it was a reinvention for the era of mass production, sold with a mythology. Its designers were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, one of many occult groups that emerged in the late 1800s.

They reimagined the tarot from centuries earlier, adjusting the figures and symbolism to fit their view. Mass production meant millions of decks could be sold.