Seventeen prescient tales of the near future: from global chaos to our obsession with celebrities, from virtual reality to the final flooding of Calcutta, from genetic engineering to the future of the Internet. A truly perceptive mind sized it all up decades before most people realized what was going down. "An impressive body of work that takes an unflinching and often humorous look at humanity's greatest challenges and foibles. Akers builds worlds with amazing prescience that are remarkably familiar to our up-to-the-minute sensibilities. You will be educated, you will laugh, and you will be enticed to think in a larger way about our world and the role of technology within it." --Dr. James D. Neill, Astrophysicist, California Institute of Technology