John Higgs announces new book

John Higgs

John Higgs has announced the topic of his next book. The Future Starts Here: Adventures in the Twenty-First Century will be out in May.

He writes,

There are plenty of books making predictions about AI, VR, climate change, big data and so on, but because they do so from a twentieth century mindset they quickly fall into the trap of lemon-sucking disaster porn. If my book works as planned, it will reboot your assumptions about the future and leave you feeling far more positive and involved in the days ahead. If you’re familiar with my previous books, you’ll see how it couldn’t have been written without doing those earlier books first.

The twenty-first century will, I suspect, be a good test of the validity of what the author Jeremy Lent calls cognitive history. This is the study of how ideas shape history – as he puts it, “culture shapes values and those values shape history”. This notion is of great interest to me because before I read Jeremy Lent I never really knew how to describe my books or what I do. I now realise that all my non-fiction books are attempts at cognitive history, so if it becomes accepted as a Genuine Thing that would help me a great deal. Yuval Noah Harari’s megaselling masterpiece Sapiens is another example of cognitive history, so it seems there’s an appetite for it.

More here.