Predictions (12 volumes, Phoenix, £2 each in UK)
These slim books of just under sixty pages each are intended as a guide to the future in various fields, all of them with immediate relevance to us. They cover the future of cosmology, of weather, warfare, religion, Europe, crime and punishment, men, population, disease, genetic manipulation, terrorism, and the Middle East respectively. Written in a popular but not simplistic manner, they do not talk down to or flatter potential readers; the scientific ones, in particular, seem to be determinedly factual in approach, not speculative or soft-peddling. John Gribbin, writing about cosmology, states very firmly that the Universe did begin with the Big Bang and even measures its age - 13 billion years. The historian Hugh Thomas, discussing the future of Europe, points out the important obstacles to total unification and concludes: "the full federal consummation is improbable." The message from Stephen Tumin, writing about crime and punishment, seems to be that prisons are unlikely to disappear and that the record of rehabilitation has been disappointing. John I. Clarke, dealing with the world's population problems, insists that "fertility decline is not enough. It must also be matched by economic growth in the poorer parts of the world." And Matt Ridley, discussing disease in general and AIDs in particular, reminds us that most deaths in the world are not caused by novel diseases but by old, preventable ones such as TB, dysentery and malaria. A relative disappointment is the rather smug and politically correct essay by Felipe FernandezArmesto on religion, while Dave Hill's one on the future of men, while not unintelligent, deals with fashionable aspiration rather than with fact.