SOURCE: Hope, Francis. “Whatever Next.” New Statesman 80, no. 2063 (2 October 1970): 419-20.

In the following review, Hope asserts that Future Shock fails to present original ideas and neglects to examine topics in a broader historical or sociological context.

Change is today's great constant. Nothing grates so stalely on the ear as the rhetoric of novelty: ‘dynamic new techniques will totally alter our ways of thinking about the exciting challenge of the future …’ Nothing amazes less than the Amazing World of Tomorrow. Even in 1904, when Chesterton wrote The Napoleon of Notting Hill, he saw that the interesting paradox was a guess that the future would be much like the present, only a little less so. We have advanced since then from an arithmetical to a geometrical rate of change, taking for granted not only perpetual motion but perpetual acceleration too. It's a poor graph that doesn't curve up off the page...