This book reads like a textbook. It has a lot of information and informed opinion that have been bound together with more glue than editing. It doesn't read like a book as much as it does a collection of semi-related chapters.

That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I wouldn't get this expecting a smooth cover-to-cover read.

The topics range from the very interesting to the tedious, but the breaks and asides that are frequent in the book can be light reading for a thumbnail sketch of a particular topic.

I think the real value in this book is more of a reference book, to be consulted on specific topics as the future progresses, and I imagine as we near the finish-line for the book (2050) it would be interesting to look at the predictions and score them for accuracy. ( )

How does one write a definitive guide to the future? Certainly not by consulting psychics, theologians, and eager purveyors of Amageddon, who for more than 2000 years have been consistently wrong about the nature and (supposedly imminent) timing of our demise. Author Jon Turney instead consulted the scientific experts best able to speak to the changes and challenges faced by our species and our planet. The challenges are many, and include the following: overpopulation, depletion of fossil fuels, global climate change, water depletion, insufficient food, mass extinction, natural disasters, and the horrors of modern warfare. Not that this guide is all doom and gloom -- insofar as possible, Turney also outlines brighter prospects and possibilities.

This guide is packed with information, and the challenges it outlines are daunting. In periodic sidebars, major experts offer their highest hopes, worst fears, and best guess about what is likely to happen. The book is dense, as befits its subject -- no one ever said the future would be easy! Much of it focuses on the next 50 to 100 years of human existence. In fact, however, we know more about the very distant future, a subject covered in the final chapter.

So what can we and our planet ultimately look forward to? The next Ice Age is due within a few thousand years (and likely to last for 100 thousand years -- as long as our species has existed to date). The last one buried much of North America and Europe under miles of ice, so the impact will be enormous. Looking ahead 500 million years from now, most of the remaining plant life is likely to disappear due to CO2 depletion, and in 1 billion years, the sun shall get hot enough to boil off the oceans. By the time the earth falls into the sun 7 to 8 billion years from now, multicellular life will be long gone.

It turns out that the theological doomsayers are right -- the world is coming to an end! But before then, we have a lot of future to look forward to -- or to worry about. This book is the best available guide on what to expect and prepare for.

Note added, 6 years later: What a difference a few years makes! The next Ice Age? CO2 depletion? We now know that global climate change, due to CO2 accumulation, threatens human existence, such that some experts consider that our species may be extinct 30 years hence. This situation shows the perils of trying to predict the future. But with hindsight, I'm surprised that the 2011 Rough Guide did not better recognize the threats that are now so very apparent. ( )

This review for LT Early Reviewers is by a different member of the albanyhill family:

I just finished The Rough Guide to The Future by Jon Turney, last night. Every page of it was filled with interesting information and many references to further reading. It was upbeat all the way, and filled with hope and conviction that humanity will find a way to solve all its problems. It was perfectly edited and proofread so everything makes sense and is easy to read. From Turney's perspective the time up until about 2050 looks wonderful. The food production will keep pace with the growing human population because of increasingly sophisticated technology. Those of us who enjoy the perks and pleasures of technology will not be disappointed. It is going to be a wonderful world, even if it is a little warmer.

See the rest of the review at http://probaway.wordpress.com/2011/04/15/the-rough-guide-to-the-future-by-jon-tu...

I am doing two things here that I have never done in my many years on LibraryThing ... I'm adding a book that I have not finished reading, and I am writing a "pre-review" that will exist only on the LT site. The reason for this is that Jon Turney's "The Rough Guide to The Future" and I are just not finding a common ground. I have had this book now for over three months, and have made it less than 10% in. For somebody that aims to read 72 non-fiction books a year, this is insanely slow-going.

Why is this the case? Well, #1 the book is not all that interesting. It treats "The Future" like a travel destination, and breaks it down into sections which are then walked through bit by bit. There is no "flow", no "narrative" to speak of ... it reads like a large pile of research that's been barely structured into "a book". Also, it is extremely dense ... nominally 376 pages, it's formatted into two columns of tightly-packed small-ish font text, columns that would easily have been an individual page in a lot of paperbacks, so figure this to be "realistically" in the 750-page range. To top this off, it is bizarrely laid out, with what should be "sidebars" appearing 2-3 pages away from the text which refers to them, requiring a lot of jumping around. Worst of all, it seems to be focused primarily on "doom & gloom" featuring pictures from dystopian movies of what horrible things might happen in "The Future" ... if I wanted to consume that crap, I'd watch the moronic "the sky is falling" shows on cable.

So, it's a LONG book, it's slow-going, and it turns out to be something that I'm not particularly interested in reading. And, I'm giving up on it.

Well, not "giving up" but I'm putting it into the "whenever" stack in the bathroom, to grab a page or two to read if the newspaper's not handy. Having this in my "active reading" pile was just killing my reading schedule, and I am likely to get a couple of dozen books that I want to read finished in the time it would take me to plow through this turkey. Who knows, maybe in 6 to 9 months I'll have this done and have some nice things to say about it (don't hold your breath), but for the time being it's "taking a seat" with the other low-priority ("but I want to finish reading at some point") books next to the toilet.

So, does this sound like TMI to you? Sorry. But I didn't want this one unappealing book being a road block in my Early Reviewers participation. So, it's been added to my library unfinished (much against my scruples), and I'm adding this written-on-site "review" based on 3 months worth of banging my head against it. I'm not happy with either part of that, but I'm making the most of a bad situation.

- B.T.

A very content heavy book.

The author, Jon Turney, attempts to look at what 'future' means from many different angles. He explores the concept of 'time' and how it and 'future' fit together. He examines the history of future, recent future and different varieties of futurology which set the stage for the areas of the future that he then comments on. Main areas of focus include science, energy, climate change, health, populations (human and other), war, disasters and information. Resources for further research are included at the end of each section (both books/papers and websites) and short profiles of fifty expert futurologists and scientists are included along with their best hope, worse fear and most likely outcome in regards to the future.

The author does an admirable job of sifting through the mountains of information and data and attempting to find the most clear and concise outlook. Of particular interest to me was his chapter on life, society and values as social aspects are often overlooked when discussing the future. Where the author does a less than admirable job in future speculation is in the the area of energy and climate change. His tone is belittling to any idea that is not in agreement with his own (evidenced by heavy use of quotation marks) and while I may be in agreement with his views, I do not feel that his purpose of providing information is served by being derogatory to differing opinions and options. Another area of concern to me was the lack of female input. Of the 50 scientists he profiles less than a fourth were female and his resources had the same lack of female representation. I concluded that this lack must be due to author oversight rather than intentional omission as it seemed at odds with how meticulous he was with his other data construction and conclusions. Regardless of the cause, more female involvement in building the future seems necessary and beneficial considering they comprise over half of the world's population.

This book seems to be geared towards and should have great appeal for the techno-geeks among us. The writing is interesting and well done and the resources and sites for further research are plentiful and span the gamut (with the caveats noted above). This book is very content heavy and has the same feel as a textbook so it is not a light, easy read. If you are up for the challenge it provides a great deal of food for thought. ( )