What will the world look like in the not-too-distant future? It's a fun game to play sitting around the pub/dinner-party table, but unless you grew up in the house of the astronomer and science-fiction writer Sir Fred Hoyle (who, incidentally, coined the term "big bang", even though he rejected the theory), where lunches with the physicist Richard Feynman were not uncommon, chances are your beautiful "vision" will evaporate with the inexorable passing of time.
So it is a brave man who commits such ideas to paper. Which makes it all the more delicious that when Sir Fred's son, Geoffrey, was asked to do just that in the early 1970s, he got so many things right. And though 2011: Living in the Future was intended for children, the renewed interest in Hoyle's work (Facebook groups, a new US publisher) owes as much to Hoyle's prescience as it does the period charm provided by theaccompanying illustrations by Alasdair Anderson that have become something of a cult.
