The great war that never was — 1871–1914
Abstract I.F. Clarke concludes his two-part study of the forecasts of future warfare in the half-century before the outbreak of World War I. He argues that the experts failed to foresee trench warfare and the long stalemate on the Western Front, precisely because they were experts, and that the devastating effects of the new military technologies ended the old-style belief in the uninterrupted forward march of mankind.
Oldspeak—the language of the future?
Abstract With this article the series moves on to a two-part examination of the many factors—military, political, technological—that encouraged the new communications industry of the late 19th century to promote the forecasting of future developments. A large part of this publishing was taken up with the popular stories of ‘the next great war’. Their visions of limited and fast-moving wars could not hope to anticipate the shapes of wars-to-come, because they were written in the old language of uniform progress and were grounded in assumptions that advances in the military technologies would speed up the conduct of warfare.
1948 and not nineteen eighty-four
Abstract This article marks the return of I.F. Clarke to the pages of Futures. Those readers who have followed Futures since our first number in September 1968 will recall his long-running series on the development of futuristic fiction and the coming of modern forecasting techniques. He likes to be known as the oldest inhabitant of Futures so far. Professor Clarke was once described, with some accuracy, as ‘Mr Future’ by a Glasgow newspaper. The style recognized the work he has done in the investigation of the many ways in which our ideas about the future have evolved and have found expression in science fiction, imaginary wars, ideal states, Orwellian nightmares and in the proliferation of futurological studies that have swept the world since Ossip K. Flechtheim coined the term futurologist in 1943. This specially commissioned article on Orwell's true place in futures studies serves as an hors d'oeuvre to a new series in Futures by Professor Clarke: “An almanac of anticipations” will begin in the next issue.