I'm John Baxter with my colleague Gregor Coppoli, editor and publisher, Defense and Foreign Affairs.

Writing most recently, not of the near future, not even of the future to the forties, but the future to the next century.

I enjoy it, and extremely I have always enjoyed reading science fiction as a young person,

and have recently returned to rereading the same books I wrote about, or the left end of God.

Because I wanted to imagine how it was they thought about the future, 20 years, 50 years, 100 years, not the dating, the projection.

Gregor is also helping me understand, to project into the balance of this century.

And in a new essay, he identifies certain themes that I may have understood correctly.

So here's the author himself, I can validate or inform myself.

Gregor, what I see from your essay is that we're going to move into a period where authoritarianism is accepted because it can deliver.

It can be called democracy, but it will be delivering on the basis of strong leadership.

At the same time, there will be a breakup or a devolution or a disorganization of large states, such as India or China or Russia, or even some of the African states, in the more manageable economic units or not.

And that the conflict that we see now in places around the world will continue during this breakup.

For example, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine right now would be an example from the early part of the 21st century about the disputes that will break into modern weapons, drones, missiles, tanks.

Have I read you correctly? Thank you.

Well, yes and no, as usual, you're set an optimist, John, as were the great science fiction writers of the 20th century.

Because largely they saw the future as being something which would extrapolate from our immediate life and immediate past.

And that is technological growth.

What we have to realize is that this technological growth, which has been underway now for century and a half in real terms, is not going to continue.

It's already breaking up and that the history of humanity has been that technological growth, scientific growth, the growth of knowledge comes in spurts.

And it runs out of steam at predictable points in the ebb and flow of civilizations.

We are already seeing a reduction in technological growth.

So some of the things which are theoretically possible if we extrapolate from the present are probably not going to occur or not going to occur in the same way that we thought of them as occurring.

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