Review Detail

‘Ultimate Book of the Future’ by Stephanie Warren Drimmer, a National Geographic Kids book, is a beautiful journey through a wide variety of questions and topics. Could a robot become president? Could humans teleport? Could robots become smarter than people? Could humans live forever? Could Jurassic Park come true? These are only a smattering of the questions posed in this book that not only includes tons of facts in easily readable format, but bright, colorful, engaging images that pop off every page and intensify the amount of interest anyone might have about the topics on any given page.

Additional fun facts, such as how it takes 45 minutes to put on a traditional space suit and how hummingbirds are the only birds that can fly backward, line the pages of the book. Readers will arouse their curiosity and be interested enough that they will want to look into the ideas throughout the book themselves.

Even though all sorts of things in the book have yet to happen or don’t yet exist, that’s all part of the fun. If we don’t look to the future, try to figure out what might be next or what we want to be next, then progress will come to a halt. As the afterword of the book states, “that’s where experts called futurists come in.” Research and educated guesses (otherwise called hypotheses) are a futurist’s best friends, along with other items that help them make connections to help society move forward, knowing all of the possibilities that exist.

When our grandparents were kids, smartphones were a thing of the future. Even in the 1990s, video calls weren’t an ever present part of society like they are today. TVs haven’t been around for all time, and color television only began to be a part of society in the 1950s. The future is what you make of it, and futurists are looking to help us discover through this book just how society may adapt to everything that is to come.