Tomorrow’s trends swirl in a pixel glow
Shaken and stirred and tipped in cups to go:
Drink deep, peer close, guess what we cannot know.
Ten years is long, and yet, not long enough,
Changes sift down unseen, or fast and rough,
In politics, in tech, in fights, in fluff.
Upon this planet shall be constant war,
Cod will come swarming back to Iceland’s shore,
Today’s new fads become a facile bore.
Nations will borrow all the banks will lend.
We will print perfect statues, and this trend
Will fill our houses with them, and then end.
With oracles reopening in Greece,
One war will end in unexpected peace,
Others go on and on with no surcease.
The unheard find a voice and have their say.
China and Spain declare free marriage day.
Democracy comes to the USA.
Fast and ubiquitous and very neat,
The word “computer” becomes obsolete.
As screens you cannot touch seem incomplete.
One thing you’d never guess will catch on here.
Mummies and Termites cause box office fear.
Cold fusion will be very very near,
Old age will keep receding as we age.
Books become beautiful on every page.
The net will bring us friendship, hope, and rage.
Doctors do miracles, but people die,
We’ll get no closer to a reason why.
We send more robots up to search the sky.
But I’ll still write in Protext ’91,
And you’ll get famous and have lots of fun,
And all the best of life be just begun.
Thus incrementally, as lives unfold,
We’ll change unnoticing until we hold
Our different world the same, its tale untold.
Bad mixed with good, safe, scary, normal, strange,
Ten years of human choice and human range,
The only certainty in life is change.
May 2015.
This appeared in the Huffington Post. They asked ten science fiction writers to make predictions for the next ten years. I stared at the screen hopelessly and asked if I could write a poem instead.
