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July 20, 2019: A Day in the Life of the 21st Century

Arthur C. Clarke (Editor),

Tim White (illustrator)

3.48 · Rating details · 104 ratings · 12 reviews

Futurists will welcome this book by the science fiction community's prolific dean whose 1963 classic Profiles of the Future defined possible futures, some of which already have come true. Clarke rejects any label as prophet; as per Profiles' subtitle, he deals with "limits of the possible." In July 20, 2019, he views a day in the life of the 21st century. The oversize, ill ...more

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Paperback, An Omni book, 281 pages

Published April 28th 1987 by Grafton (first published October 1st 1986)

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Jul 20, 2019 Mark rated it liked it

With the upcoming 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing, I thought that it might be fun to look at a book that, first published in 1987, tried to imagine what it would be like on July 20th 2019.

It is a coffee table book, in a large format, that is meant to impress. I love the cover art, created by Tim White, which shows a huge aircraft flying towards the reader whilst flying over a road which has futuristic cars and lorries speeding along it and a city in the distance.

In his introduction, S ...more

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Jul 20, 2019 Dragon Is In Her Book Cave rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: adult-fiction, science

I did not know "July 20, 2019" existed until, well, July 20, 2019. One of my coworkers put this book on display at the library, and today at work I nabbed it off the shelf (where not a single patron even spared a glance at it. Naturally, my maternal librarian instincts kicked in, and I was forced to rescue this poor, overlooked, outcast book from an inevitable death by dust bunnies.) I have worked at this library for 8 years, and I never once knew it was in our collection. Which is odd, because I did not know "July 20, 2019" existed until, well, July 20, 2019. One of my coworkers put this book on display at the library, and today at work I nabbed it off the shelf (where not a single patron even spared a glance at it. Naturally, my maternal librarian instincts kicked in, and I was forced to rescue this poor, overlooked, outcast book from an inevitable death by dust bunnies.) I have worked at this library for 8 years, and I never once knew it was in our collection. Which is odd, because I usually seek out weird shit like this. Also, it was last checked out in 1996.
Anyway, I brought this book home and leafed through this strange little vision of today (or what was then the future when this book was published in 1986). Never before have I been more thoroughly entertained, bemused, and horrified, a bizarre potpourri of emotions if there ever was one. It was like watching a subpar Futurama episode written in the 1980s.
This book has a lot of problems. White straight men, like the author, have a luxury in envisioning the future. Their future is baseball players with bionic arms, Hollywood resurrecting Marilyn Monroe's body and voice through the miracle of computer technology, robo-dogs, and of course simply mind-blowing zero gravity coitus (yes, this is all in the book). The future is rosy, alluring, and mostly an exciting make-believe game to play in the mind. It's not so much that Clarke's predictions are erroneous (some speculations are actually rather insightful and have indeed come to pass) but that he cannot - does not - envision a future that is better for women, people of color, indigenous people, queer people, disabled people, or anyone who is not a white, heterosexual male. This is a future written by the white straight male, and that comes through potently in this book's pages. The future belongs not to him and other white men but to all of the rest of us. We are writing it, and envisioning it, and creating it.
Despite its faults, this book was worth my perusal, I suppose, mostly for lines like this: "The best sex in 2019 probably won't be found on Earth. It will happen three hundred miles in space. The most romantic hotel in the universe will be found orbiting the Earth, perhaps taking the form of a commercial wing on NASA's permanent space station, and you'll be able literally to bounce off the walls with your partner." Who knew space was so sexy (with the exception of Barbarella). There's nothing more erotic than potential death via the vacuum of space.
Mostly I'm just happy I got to read a book called "July 20, 2019" on July 20, 2019. This made the geek nook of my brain explode with giddy, bookwork joy. I will probably never get to do this again, unless someone knows a title with an exact date, say, in the next 80 years or so. ...more

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Oct 12, 2020 Jim Razinha rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: small-stacks-of-found-books

I found this in an antique store a couple of months ago and as I’d never seen a copy before, nor expect to again, I bought it. Published in 1986, it is Clarke’s vision of what life in the 21st century would be like. Being Clarke, one would assume that the predictions were more educated than not, but quite a bit of this is fanciful wishful thinking. Right off the bat, the Introduction is a Letter from a Lunar Inhabitant. That humans haven’t “set foot” outside of low Earth orbit since 1972 certain I found this in an antique store a couple of months ago and as I’d never seen a copy before, nor expect to again, I bought it. Published in 1986, it is Clarke’s vision of what life in the 21st century would be like. Being Clarke, one would assume that the predictions were more educated than not, but quite a bit of this is fanciful wishful thinking. Right off the bat, the Introduction is a Letter from a Lunar Inhabitant. That humans haven’t “set foot” outside of low Earth orbit since 1972 certainly would have surprised the 1986 Clarke, as might some of his “hits” and probably more of his “misses”. I like looking at (smart) predictions and seeing how close we are. That this is only one year past Clarke’s target is a great perspective. Ray Kurzweil made many predictions in several books and some worked, some didn’t (though he was quite generous to himself in each subsequent book as to how well his turned out). Some of Clarke’s may be 50 to 100 years more from now to fruition. Or maybe 20. Who knows?

Clarke looked at medicine, robotics, education, transportation, a space station, entertainment (movies), sports, home automation, changes to an office environment, psychiatry, life extension and war. Technology is hard to predict 33 years in the future, even for Clarke. He was locked into the tech of the day for data storage - optical discs - which haven’t kept up with solid state multi terabyte storage systems. And I am not sure why he mentioned several times that people could be traveling at Mach 22. And as with his later fiction, he is weakest when it comes to social interactions. And wildly off the mark on performance enhancing sports through chemical and bionic means. Spot on for using computers to analyze and help train, but ixnay of the hormones.

Some of the ideas he floated are in place or in development today, but not ubiquitous. Home automation is a thing, just not most places, and Alexa may have some AI and capabilities, but “she” isn’t close to semi-sentient. He pretty much nailed the price of a movie ticket, if not the experience, but he did note that the content of entertainment wouldn’t change much. (I won’t tell him about “reality” television if you won’t {wink}.) Hugely optimistic with respect to psychiatry - most things should be an easy fix with all kinds of designer (he doesn’t call the that) drugs, right? Psychiatry may have progressed the least of his examinations - but it’s a fuzzy science at best so that is understandable. And war...well, he can’t be blamed for overestimating the use and impact of tanks.

“In spite of the emphasis on longevity, death in the 21st century is no longer a dirty word.” Statements like this pervade and there is no way Clarke, much like the Enlightenment Framers, could anticipate a recoil from science, the retrogressive social march, the exultation of ignorance that roadblocks any progress (which unlike Clarke’s “death”, is a dirty word, at least among the backwards population.)

...more

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Oct 18, 2019 James rated it liked it

An intriguing book which I'd deliberately put aside so that I could be about half-way through it on the titular date. Not speculative fiction, but rather a series of speculative essays on how life might be expected to be lived in 2019, as seen from the mid- to late- 1980s. The book is listed as being edited by Clarke with work by some dozen or more contributors, but it is often difficult to tell how much of the writing is the contributors' and how much is Clarke's own.

As might be expected from a An intriguing book which I'd deliberately put aside so that I could be about half-way through it on the titular date. Not speculative fiction, but rather a series of speculative essays on how life might be expected to be lived in 2019, as seen from the mid- to late- 1980s. The book is listed as being edited by Clarke with work by some dozen or more contributors, but it is often difficult to tell how much of the writing is the contributors' and how much is Clarke's own.

As might be expected from a book of future speculation there are direct hits, wildly optimistic targets which were not met and underestimations which have been greatly surpassed. Mush of the interest lies in seeing how this possible now could have looked and how plausibly our own reality has shifted from the path suggested in the book. In some aspects, the suggested 2019 is still one which might be envisaged in the not too distant future; in others we are already way past the speculation. It is perhaps ironic that, with Clarke being the visionary who foresaw satellite telecommunications, it is in this field that the book was least accurate. In 1987, when the book was written, the internet was in its infancy and the World Wide Web was a mere lightbulb moment hanging over Tim Berners-Lee's head. The possible future of sex freed from stigma, charted journeys through pinpoint-accurate drug psychedelia, and legal performance-enhanced sports are probably still just pipe-dreams (or pipe-nightmares if you prefer), but several of the sections such as those on hospital and school routines, seem not that far from our reality.

It should be continuously remembered that this is NOT a book of prophecies and predictions, but rather speculation based on cutting-edge research in the 1980s and extrapolation from data. The geopolitical changes which occurred with the fall of the Soviet Union, and all the downstream collateral from it, would have been seen as very unlikely at the time of the book's writing, as too would many of the other social trends and political changes which have occurred in the last 32 years. As such, the book was never going to be (and was never intended as) an attempt to describe the future - rather it was a suggestion of what might happen. And it is fascinating to examine this alternative 2019 from that viewpoint.

As far as the book itself is concerned in other ways, it is a handsome tome, with writing which is easily accessible without stinting on the science (as, indeed, should be expected by anyone who has ever read much Clarke). The text is broken down into easily digested sections, each detailing daily life through one of its aspects: life at home, at school, at work, travelling, in space, etc., etc., etc. Perhaps one point in which it does fail is the dated (even dated for 1987 - it feels more like early 1970s) photographic illustrations, which detract rather than adding to the text. What images there should be should at leat relate to, and hopefully enhance, the reading, but these do the opposite. Often they seem to have been grabbed at random from industrial catalogues and stock photography sites. ...more

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Jul 20, 2019 Ross Vincent rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: tbr-2019, non-fiction

Science Fiction Giant Arthur C Clarke wrote this book back in the early 80's; in it, he made "predictions" of what life would be like on July 20, 2019.

Today.

Well, he was off on a few things. There was no WWIII; instead, we have the War on Terror, again Non-Nation enemies. There are no radical ideas on death and living past 100 - human race recognizes that death is going to happen. There are no wild medical practices for health, sexuality and mental health. The ideas of living in space is still a ...more

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Jul 20, 2019 Connie rated it liked it · review of another edition

A book that was interesting the first time I read it, when it was new in 1986. Rediscovered it on my bookshelf and decided I would read it the week before 7/20/2019. Finishing it today, the date of the book, there were many more misses than hits. No cell phones or much internet discussed even though they were already in their infancy. He has full blown WWIII in Europe with the USSR as the aggressor, but no middle east wars. Overall an interesting read of what someone thought the world would look ...more

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Sep 03, 2017 Nicholas Bobbitt rated it liked it · review of another edition

While this is supposedly a nonfiction attempt look into the future, it reads more like science-fiction and wild speculation than something which involved any real research. Clarke writes well but has little to offer in terms of sources for his claims on humanity's future, and the book suffers for that. Had he given some professional opinions or resources for his claims, the book would be much better off. As it stands, it was an enjoyable read I was annoyed did not have any footnoted sources or a ...more

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Jul 23, 2019 Laura Latinski rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I love this book. I read it when I was a teenager, and have always planned to read it on the exact date. Many of his predictions did come true, and many did not. It's a great mix of bitter pessimism and almost childlike optimism and everything in between. ...more

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Aug 12, 2019 Jose Torroja Ribera rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Muy interesante, pero las cosas no han ido tan rápido como Clarke creía.

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Jul 20, 2019 Lori rated it really liked it · review of another edition

It’s a little crazy to read this book on this day. Some of it is hilariously wrong, but he got more right than you’d expect.

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Jul 23, 2019 Michael Roman rated it liked it · review of another edition

A fun coffee table book...man, the future had so much potential.

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Apr 28, 2013 Abraham Revilla rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Toda una visión, nada alejada de la realidad, de lo que nos depara el futuro (ya no tan lejano) y, considerando que el libro se escribió en 1987, muchas cosas que vienen ahí ya se han cumplido. ¡Me encantó!

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About Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke

8,482 followers

Arthur Charles Clarke was one of the most important and influential figures in 20th century science fiction. He spent the first half of his life in England, where he served in World War Two as a radar operator, before emigrating to Ceylon in 1956. He is best known for the novel and movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which he co-created with the assistance of Stanley Kubrick.

Clarke was a graduate of King ...more