When I saw the title of Marian Salzman and Ira Matathia’s book on trends, Next Now, I was totally lured in. The world is moving at such a frantic pace these days that if you’re not careful, you’ll only be able to keep up with your small part of it. As a father, I like to consider what’s coming down the pipe. I need to be able to advise my kids regarding education, possible job futures, impending medical breakthroughs, health risks, and general states-of-affairs regarding political and economic trends.

I spend a lot of time considering the future and what may or may not happen. And it’s not just about my family. I’m also a working writer. The fiction novels I pen these days tend to have a lot of research in them. You can’t just write a spy novel with an evil, nefarious villain behind all the bad things without going into why he’s that way. Readers want to know how that villain is motivated. They want to know what political, religious, or economic sanctions triggered that villain’s point of view.

So I tend to read a lot of online material, periodical magazines, book reviews, books, and watch a lot of television regarding emerging technologies. As it turns out, I’m either more educated in these fields that I thought I was, or the authors of this book didn’t quite go far enough with their explorations of what’s coming next.

Most of material they cover, I was already familiar with to a degree. Moreover, I was disappointed because they usually only superficially skim the surface of material they introduce in the book. In fact, some of the things they write about I’ve already been covering in my fiction for a couple of years. Such as the emerging economic growth of China and the direct challenge to the United States for oil as a consumer. A lot of people blame the oil companies for making vast amounts of profits, and surely they are, but the only reason they’re able to do that is because the market has expanded and the quantity of the product has not. In fact, being more environmentally aware as well as politically conscious of emerging Third World countries has hindered oil production as well.