David Christian, Professor Emeritus in the Department of History and Archaeology and bestselling author of Origin Story: A Big History of Everything, is renowned for pioneering the emerging discipline of Big History, which surveys the whole of the past.

With his book, Future Stories: A user’s guide to the future, he casts his sharp analytical eye forward, offering an introduction to the strange world of the future, and a guide to what we think we know about it at all scales, from the predictive mechanisms of single-celled organisms and tomato plants to the merging of colossal galaxies billions of years from now.

Drawing together science and history, philosophy and theology from a huge range of places and times, Professor Christian explores how we prepare for uncertain futures, including the future of human evolution, artificial intelligence, interstellar travel, and more. By linking the study of the past much more closely to the study of the future, we can begin to imagine what the world will look like in the next 100 years and consider solutions to the biggest challenges facing us all.

Future Stories is published in Australia by Penguin.