In the future...by editor Tom Sastry

Some inspiration for our call for poems about the future from editor Tom Sastry! 

In the future...

things you can customise will include: the sound of rainfall; the colour of the grass; the number of moons in the night sky.

new continents will appear on the maps of your hands.

there will be a sitcom with a running joke in which a couple complain about their robot overlord while the robot does the housework.

it will become a cliché around the world that English has a hundred different words for 'idiot'.

you will be able to download a digital simulation of someone from your past. This will result in a new kind of sadness for which no word currently exists.

machines will misunderstand you in the same ways humans do.

there will be good years, full of laughter and sometimes a little hope.

at first, you will be terrified by the optimism of the young.

you will write a letter to your twenty-year old self, advising it to disregard the letter you wrote some years before

time travel will continue to take place in one direction only, and at a uniform pace.

pockets will become redundant.

there will be beautiful graphics and ugly streets; digital affluence and material squalor. Food will be scarce; time will be scarce; love will be scarce. Escapism will not.

the settlement of other planets will result in whole civilisations from which we can receive only fragmentary news, several years after the event. This will lead to wild speculations about life in the colonies. Intellectuals will speak of the New Medieval Ignorance.

research will show that in the robot age, the happiest people are those who have learnt to accept simulated kindness as real.

a body will be a body not just anybody.

the strangeness will still be within you.

there will be a fashion for designer emotions including smorger, popness and mux but they will never replace traditional recreational drugs.

people will go away for months just to sleep.