Here's an excerpt:

When the present promises only economic hardship and political upheaval, what does the future look like?

In 2009, it looks like a world of gleaming spaceships filled with enlightened people who have emerged with their humanity intact after a terrible war. They have entered the 23rd century, shed racism, no longer use money, possess seemingly magical technologies and are devoted to peaceful exploration. I refer of course to "Star Trek" and its powerful story of a better tomorrow, which has been mesmerizing audiences for almost half a century and returns to movie theaters this coming May with an eagerly anticipated 11th full-length feature.

But wait. The future also looks like this: a dark, violent world where a horrific war between humans and cyborgs leads to the near-extermination of humanity. This vision, in the latest "Terminator" movie, is also arriving at your nearest mutiplex in May.

We imagine the future in places other than the movie theater, of course. Still, these two familiar franchises underscore the conflicting stories we tell ourselves in uncertain times about what lies ahead: Either we're bound for a techno-utopia of adventure, or a grim, Orwellian dystopia where humanity is on the brink of implosion.
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We've seen this dichotomy before. Nearly a century ago, Europe was headed toward war on an unprecedented scale. Traditional alliances evaporated, shocking new weapons ripped apart bodies and countries, and a generation of artists such as Picasso responded with paintings that showed reality reduced to unsettling, jagged abstraction.

Meanwhile, a pulp writer from Chicago named Edgar Rice Burroughs was concocting stories about a soldier who wakes up one morning in a miraculous, futuristic world full of lost cities, advanced technologies and giant green men.

(Yes, I know there are a couple of errors in the online version that have to do with Barsoom's inhabitants and an unfortunate Buck/Flash, Han/Mongo mixup. Sorry - hopefully those will be fixed soon.)

Check out the rest of the story here. I'll also be chatting about the story live online at the Washington Post site tomorrow (Monday,Jan. 5) from 1-2 PM EST. You can submit questions for me to answer here - I can't promise I'll answer every question, but I'll do my damndest to try!

Plus my article is just one part of an incredibly cool package about the future, with articles on everything from the coming population crisis and robot warriors, to climate change and the future of female leadership. And there's an amazing infographic about future tech.

Dirda (the same critic who's worked tirelessly to promote Neal Stephenson, Howard Waldrop and other SF writers as literary greats) makes a list of a dozen small presses that you should check out, but the list ends up ballooning beyond that number.

Singled out for approval are Tachyon Press, for anthologies like Jeff VanderMeer's The New Weird and books like Thomas Disch's last short novel and short story collection, The Word Of God and The Wall Of America; Prime Books, which publishes Paul Di Filippo and is reissuing some classic ghost tales; Old Earth Books, which just put out a book of Waldrop's long fiction; and Big Mouth Press, the children's imprint of Small Beer Press, which just published The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories (about a family who has adventures, usually on a Monday, involving ghosts, time travel and witches, among other things.)

On the subject of Disch, Dirda writes:

The Word of God is a short novel, told from the viewpoint of God, who it seems is also Tom Disch; The Wall of America collects a number of what one might call comic and bitter fables. In the title story, a Homeland Security wall between Canada and the United States is turned into an art gallery by the National Endowment for the Arts. I've collected Disch ever since I met the multi-talented novelist-poet-critic-curmudgeon in 1980 at the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston: As massive as a body-builder and covered with tattoos, that night he was wearing a bowling shirt. Disch was clearly a man of letters after my own heart.

He also has nice things to say about Subterranean Press, which is putting out more stories (yay) by Michael Swanwick. And Night Shade Press, which has distinguished itself among lovers of Clark Ashton Smith and Lord Dunsany. [Washington Post]

Achenbach's point is smart, if unsurprising. His thoughts on why American politicians tend to avoid the subject of the future are especially clear-headed:

Peterson has one recommendation: Read science fiction, especially "hard science fiction" that sticks rigorously to the scientifically possible. "If you look out into the long-term future and what you see looks like science fiction, it might be wrong," she says. "But if it doesn't look like science fiction, it's definitely wrong."

That's exciting — and a little scary. We want the blessings of science (say, cheaper energy sources) but not the terrors (monsters spawned by atomic radiation that destroy entire cities with their fiery breath).

Eric Horvitz, one of the sharpest minds at Microsoft, spends a lot of time thinking about the Next Big Thing. Among his other duties, he's president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. He thinks that, sometime in the decades ahead, artificial systems will be modeled on living things. In the Horvitz view, life is marked by robustness, flexibility, adaptability. That's where computers need to go. Life, he says, shows scientists "what we can do as engineers — better, potentially."

Our ability to monkey around with life itself is a reminder that ethics, religion and old-fashioned common sense will be needed in abundance in decades to come (see the essay on page B1 by Ronald M. Green). How smart and flexible and rambunctious do we want our computers to be? Let's not mess around with that Matrix business.

Every forward-thinking person almost ritually brings up the mortality issue. What'll happen to society if one day people can stop the aging process? Or if only rich people can stop getting old?

It's interesting that politicians rarely address such matters. The future in general is something of a suspect topic . . . a little goofy. Right now we're all focused on the next primary, the summer conventions, the Olympics and their political implications, the fall election. The political cycle enforces an emphasis on the immediate rather than the important.

Photo: IMDB