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Profiles of the Future
| Author: | Arthur C. Clarke |
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Orion Books, 2000 Bantam UK, 1964 Gollancz, 1962 |
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| Book Type: | Non-Fiction |
| Genre: | Science-Fiction |
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Synopsis
This book originally appeared in 1962, and was based on essays written during the period 1959 - 1961. Since it was concerned with ultimate possibilities, and not with achievements to be expected in the near future, even the remarkable events of the last decade have dated it very little. But Arthur Clarke has gone over the book making corrections and comments where necessary in order to bring it right up-to-date.
The author, amongst many fascinating excursions into what the future may hold, discusses the fourth dimension and the obsolescence of the law of gravity, the exploration of the entire solar system and the colonisation of some of it; seas will mined for energy and minerals, and asteroids will be pulled to Earth to supply needed materials; men, already bigger than they need be, may be bred smaller to be more efficient on less food.
Later editions carried the subtile: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible.
Contents:
- About Time
- Ages of Plenty
- Aladdin's Lamp
- Beyond Gravity
- Brain and Body
- Chart of the Future
- Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination
- Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Nerve
- Introduction (Profiles of the Future)
- Invisible Men, and Other Prodigies
- Riding on Air
- Rocket to the Renaissance - (1960)
- Space, the Unconquerable
- The Future of Transport
- The Long Twilight
- The Obsolescence of Man - (1961)
- The Quest For Speed
- The Road to Lilliput
- Voices from the Sky
- World Without Distance
- You Can't Get There From Here - (1962)
It was also the first expression of Clarke's Three Laws:
- When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that... something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
- The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
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