ReadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2025

Future's Theory

Philosophies of the World to Come

Assistant Professor Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Publishing:19th Feb '26

£75.00

This title is due to be published on 19th February, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Future's Theory cover

This book provides fascinating insights into the speculations and impacts of multiple overlapping and interdisciplinary futures.

What are the most radical transformations on the horizon of our world? And how are they irreversibly altering our experience of time, movement, language, mind, body, virtuality, power, and nature?

Cloaked in relative obscurity, future eras compel the invention of new techniques of visionary speculation. Future’s Theory provides many, shining a light on the infinity of possible futurities from multiple astonishing perspectives. Exploring how we imagine new ages in the 21st century, the book examines how alternate future dimensions will affect everything from our culture to our politics, our bodies to our minds.

Filled with original work from over 20 prominent thinkers in the domains of literature, philosophy, visual art, architecture, design, media studies, ecology, anthropology, it features immersive entries on phenomena including artificial intelligence, virtual reality, mass migration, speed, climate, geo-engineering, and automation. Contemplating the variables that will expand and distort these fields, Future’s Theory opens up a new atmosphere for thought itself in the epochs to come.

This book is a treasure trove—a constellation of brilliant thinkers conjure up images and ideas, myths and media, to summon worlds that were, that are, and that have yet to come. * Anna Greenspan, Associate Professor of Global Contemporary Media at NYU Shanghai, China *
Future’s Theory comes as a series of signals from the future, cast back into the chaos of the present. This episodic catalogue uncovers a fascinating futurist milieux, where chimeras and oracles and the orobouros return in forms of machinic thoughts and unforeseen powers and haunt the virtual. Here we have the guidelines for some secret mechanics, revealed through concise stories for cyborgs and posthumans. Future’s Theory initiates a new series of speculative and projective theories, uncoiling from discrete prescient reports of curious events that activate a new sense of wonder from the future. * Thomas Mical, Director of the Esoteric Library of the Kangra Valley, India *
A vision of possible libraries, a book of passages, a commonplace book blending the prehistoric and the post-historic--these are some of ways one might describe the contents of this dazzling collection. Using futurity as a theoretical laboratory, these thinkers invite us to reconsider our relationship to the past, and to envision the perilous enchantment of what lies ahead. * Javier Padilla, Associate Professor of English at Colgate University, USA *

ISBN: 9781350421042

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

456 pages