ABSTRACT
When we talk about the future, we may reveal more about how we understand the present than make reliable predictions about what will happen. Thinking about the future can be enabling, offering us images and hopes worth working for, warnings worth heeding, or it can be disabling, obscuring what needs to be understood and tackled, urgently, now. J.G.Ballard, the great science fiction writer, much of whose work is catastrophically dystopic, and whose vision perhaps always stems from his own experience as a child in a Japanese prisonerof-war camp, has written that now ‘to some extent the future has been enclosed in the present, for most of us the notion of the future as an alternative scheme, as an alternative world to which we are moving no longer exists’.
