Pity the poor journalist at this time of year. Because most of us are off enjoying ourselves, there's very little news to write about. And then there's the pressure from the editor to write something interesting about the previous year and something insightful about the one to come. How much worse it must be to have to contend not just with a new decade or a new century but a new millennium!
Those poor souls who are asked to predict the future always begin with a disclaimer: that predicting the future is a mug's game. And then, of course, they go on to make a whole host of educated guesses, hoping that no-one in the future will notice their howling errors, but that everyone will pat them on the back for predictions which come true. Of course the best thing about predicting our world in 2100 is that unless some of those guesses come true, we'll all be dead and no-one will notice who got it wrong and who got it right.
One of the most popular topics for crystal ball gazing at the turn of the century was life and death. Will we be be designing our babies in the new millennium? Will we go off sex? Will we live forever? Over the holiday period, a plethora of television programmes, newspapers columns and radio debates offered us a range of different visions of the next 1000 years.
But the best predictions are those which are not really predictions, but are critiques of the present taken to their invariably ugly, logical conclusions. Huxley's Brave New World is a glowing example of this. Contrary to the assertions of countless modern commentators on reproductive science, the novel is not a insightful prediction of 21st century baby making, but a literary snubbing of 1930s American mass production.
The other vital ingredient of a good prediction is a large dose of humour (something that I'm not sure Huxley possessed). First prize therefore goes to novelist Fay Weldon (see Recommends) who offered Daily Mail readers a vision of the future where sex is licensed, reproduction is regulated by ethics committees and access to cloning is handed out like life peerages: only to the great and the good. Sound familiar?
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