The Third Millennium

with David Langford

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Can we predict what fate — and man's own irrepressible inventiveness — holds in store for us in the next 1,000 years? Brian Stableford and David Langford believe we can.

Using their knowledge of the latest developments in scientific thinking, plus an understanding of historical, social and political trends, they have produced in The Third Millennium a new kind of history — a history of times to come. Cast in the form of a narrative written in the year 3000 A.D., it looks back through the centuries to the present. We are the ancestors; our future is the historian's past. Systematic, completely plausible, and above all realistic, this book is less science fiction than a serious attempt to document events that have not yet occurred.

And what events! Here is: the last nuclear war (2079, between Argentina and Brazil, resulting in the permanent destruction of Buenos Aires and a worldwide ban on nuclear weapons)…the greenhouse crisis, in which seas rose and devastating floods hit coastal cities (2015—2120)…the volcanic destruction of Japan in 2085, after which Japanese refugees spread over the world in a new diaspora, carrying their knowledge of technology and clinging to their traditions…the "greening" of the moon and other hitherto barren outer space places…the development of self-contained microworlds in the 23rd Century…the emergence of aggregated households and new forms of sex in the 28th Century…and much more.

Is it true? Can it be believed? Will the future really look like this? Whether or not it does, it is safe to say that no one has yet devised a more vivid and probable scenario for the next thousand years than the one presented in The Third Millennium.

Published as hardback by Sidgwick and Jackson in July 1985, ISBN: 0-283-99211-5
Published as hardback by Alfred A. Knopf in August 1985, ISBN: 0-394-53980-X
Published as trade paperback by Alfred A. Knopf in August 1985, ISBN: 0-394-74151-X

In the last thousand years humanity has witnessed enormous technological, social and political change. Most of this has come during the past 150 years, and there are many who believe that the speed of change is accelerating. What, then, will happen in the next thousand years?

The answers are in The Third Millennium. Firmly rooted in current knowledge and written with absolute conviction, this remarkable future history contains considerable reassurance for mankind, but also much that is deeply disturbing - culminating in a possible and hitherto unimagined end to homo sapiens.

Readers will learn of:
· The last nuclear war - and an end to nuclear weapons
· The 'Greenhouse crisis' and the flooding of major cities
· The genetic engineering of giant fish, infinitely reproducing beefsteak, living cars and houses
· Sex in the Twenty-eighth Century

A great deal can happen in one thousand years and it is all reported in The Third Millennium. This book presents the facts required to steer the human race successfully through its greatest adventure yet.

'This is a lovely book. Intelligently written, and most impressive in its imaginative sweep' - INTERZONE

Cover by Chris Moore

Published as trade paperback by Paladin Books in February 1988, ISBN: 0-586-08595-5

Translated into French as Le Troisième Millénaire

Translated into Japanese

Review by Ian Braidwood

The back of this book classifies it as futurology, which places it outside my circle of expertise. The only standard of comparison I have, is a distant memory of Arthur C. Clarke's Profiles of the Future and with that book, The Third Millennium cannot compete.

Instead of a series of essays extrapolating from current trends in technology, The Third Millennium is presented as a fictional history written at or around 3000AD. This quasi-historical approach has made the book date horribly, because Brian has had to cover political ground not as vague trends, but in terms of definite events. The result is that Brian has the USSR as a major force in the world, when it didn't even survive into the twenty first century.

Those who like me, were hoping for a guide to the Emortality universe, will also face disappointment. Brian told me before I read it, that he didn't treat The Third Millennium as canonical, but the detail in the book is far too sketchy to provide a framework and the stories themselves are far more detailed; so any coherent picture of Brian's imagined future will have to be compiled from them.

So how can this book be approached, so that's its merits are best appreciated? The closest analogue I can think of is Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, without that volume's racism and without much of its charm as well.

In truth, this volume should not be regarded as factual in any sense and was written as a coffee table book, not as serious extrapolation. The fact that it is seminal with regard to the Emortality series lends it more interest than it merits on its own; though we should be grateful that it isn't ordered among Brian's novels, for it would be the worst of them by far.

For those who have only read this one book of Brian's and liked it, then there is by comparison, near orgasmic pleasure almost anywhere else in his oeuvre.

The Brian Stableford Website