Global Utopias Project Resource Guide

"Every scientist has read one or more Utopian novels. The best known - Brave New World , The Shape of Things to Come , and even Planet of the Apes - have biological themes. They tell of a day when the human race will undergo genetic disaster because of the machinations of scientists. In Bicycling to Utopia , award-winning scientist Steve Jones looks at the future of human evolution from the perspective of current developments in human genetics. Together with other essays by experts in their fields, including Mary Archer, Alan Maynard, and Michael O'Shea, this is an authoritative and accessible summary of current thinking in many areas of science and technology. This book is intended for non-scientists wishing to learn about contemporary science and technology, and the history of these subjects. Scientists and technologists who wish to learn about developments in fields outside their own." --From publisher's summary.

"Imagining Tomorrow takes a lively and informative look at the future as envisioned in the American past. Covering the period from the 1880s to the present, it examines the expectations that various groups of Americans held regarding the technology of tomorrow. The book contributes to our understanding of twentieth-century culture, technology and what may be called the history of the future. Six of the ten essays in the book probe the future imagined for particular inventions, such as the electric light, x-ray, radio, and computer. Two others explore the way architects and designers repackaged the traditional house and city into exciting and evocative images of the future. The remaining two essays focus respectively on the novels of 19th-century technological utopians and 1930s world's fairs, both popular forums for speculating about technology and the future. Joseph J. Corn, a Lecturer in the Program on Values, Technology, Science, and Society at Stanford University, served as general editor for the volume and provides an overall historical perspective in an introduction and epilogue" (from WorldCat).

"This work from 1933 expounds on the merits of creating a utopian society through technocracy, predicting the future of art, education, religion and government under the leadership of technical professionals. It encompasses the social and economic theories of the pre-depression era" (from WorldCat).

"Focusing on a set of celebrated technologies, including steam engines, electromagnetic and geophysical instruments, early photography, and mass-scale printing, Tresch looks at how new conceptions of energy, instrumentality, and association fueled such diverse developments as fantastic literature, popular astronomy, grand opera, positivism, utopian socialism, and the Revolution of 1848. He shows that those who attempted to fuse organicism and mechanism in various ways, including Alexander von Humboldt and Auguste Comte, charted a road not taken that resonates today" (From Publisher Website).

"An unflinching look at the aspiring city-builders of our smart, mobile, connected future. In Smart Cities, urbanist and technology expert Anthony Townsend takes a broad historical look at the forces that have shaped the planning and design of cities and information technologies from the rise of the great industrial cities of the nineteenth century to the present. A century ago, the telegraph and the mechanical tabulator were used to tame cities of millions. Today, cellular networks and cloud computing tie together the complex choreography of mega-regions of tens of millions of people."--From Publisher Website

"In this book the author, father of virtual reality, and one of the world's most brilliant thinkers evaluates the negative impact of digital network technologies on the economy and particularly the middle class, citing challenges to employment and personal wealth while exploring the potential of a new information economy. This is his visionary reckoning with the most urgent economic and social trend of our age: the poisonous concentration of money and power in our digital networks. He has predicted how technology will transform our humanity for decades. He shows how Siren Servers, which exploit big data and the free sharing of information, led our economy into recession, imperiled personal privacy, and hollowed out the middle class. The networks that define our world, including social media, financial institutions, and intelligence agencies, now threaten to destroy it. But there is an alternative. In this book he charts a path toward a brighter future: an information economy that rewards ordinary people for what they do and share on the web" (from WorldCat).

Signed entries. Each entry includes suggestions for further reading.