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An exploration of potential tomorrows from the host of the massively popular and critically acclaimed podcast Flash Forward. Flash Forward: An Illustrated Guide to Possible (And Not So Possible) Tomorrows takes readers on a journey from speculative fiction to speculative "fact." Producer and host of the podcast Flash Forward, Rose Eveleth poses provocative questions about our future, which are brought to life by 12 of the most imaginative comics and graphic artists at work, including Matt Lubchanksy, Sophie Goldstein, Ben Passmore, and Box Brown. Each artist chooses a subject close to their heart-Ignatz Award nominee Julia Gfrörer, for instance, will imagine a future in which robots make art-and presents their chosen future in their own style. Drawing on her interviews with experts in various fields of study, Eveleth will then report on what is complete fantasy and what is only just out of reach in insightful essays following the comics. This book introduces compelling visions of the future and vividly explores the human consequences of developing technologies. Flash Forward reveals how complicated, messy, incredible, frightening, and strange our future might b… (more)
User reviews
The review copy I had is in black and white and, I am assuming, lower quality, so that certainly made reading
That said, the stories were very interesting and thought-provoking. Without question they were the highlights of the book. The essays, well, hopefully an editor will get hold of it before publication. Repetition is the least of the issues. They reminded me of a person I knew in college, always stating and restating the obvious, quoting anyone and everyone whether directly pertinent or just happens to have a word in common. We called that person the "mastermind of the obvious." A few paragraphs after each story to highlight what each story touched on would have been fine. But most readers, I would hope, understood the main points being made, so stating things that most well read people know just makes this reader think you meant this book for a remedial group that never reads or keeps up on current events. By the third essay I was skimming them because they only annoyed me. But I guess to get one's name as the "author" of a book of other people's stories one has to put in a lot of fluff.
While I will still recommend this, it will be for the stories, well, maybe some elementary students might get something from the essays as well, but they probably don't represent the targeted demographic, so...
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
Covering a wide variety of
Inspired by a podcast by Rose Eveleth (which I have not heard or even heard of previously), this anthology of speculative fiction presents a dozen short comics by fourteen artists about some possible future, each followed by a four- to six-page text essay by
It is so long and so slow and so dull it took me a month to wade through it.