“Back to the futurologists: A brief history of forward-looking literature” by Ian Sansom

Retro-futurology as a laissez-faire spiel:

In his 1971 novel The Futurological Congress (translated into English in 1974 by Michael Kandel), Stanislaw Lem – Poland’s H. G. Wells, with added philosophical oomph – imagined a gathering of self-congratulatory, self-absorbed, odd-bod forward-thinkers at the Eighth World Futurological Congress in Costa Rica: suffice it to say, things do not go well. The book is unsparing in its depiction of the vanities of those offering solutions, and at times almost unreadable in its narrative twists and turns, but it’s also an important reminder of the necessity of at least attempting to put a vision of the future into words. ©