Thanks to a colleague who sensed my love for science and science fiction, I was presented this book at Christmas and had all of the quiet and peace of a nature resort in Coorg and my parents home in Bangalore to read it. Unlike other futurists who pretend to know it all, the book begins with a long list of people who actually make the predictions, the author claims to merely put them all together. This may well be his humility which is not seen much in futurists who often claim to be the current version of tribal medicine men who can see the future. It bodes well when, every now and then, Kaku reminds us how badly technological innovations have failed us just because of premature hype. Many of these may well have been successes if we had managed our expectations and let them develop at their own pace. It would be amiss of me to end without asking why Kaku is so pessimistic about our software development skills. He reminds us more than once that software development is perhaps our Achilles heel, and this he concludes from his own experience, rather than quoting experts which is often how he prefaces a prediction. A visit to Bangalore may well do him some good. He may realise that computers, not humans, really write the software and no one begins with a clean sheet of paper any more. All the hardware development that fascinate him really work thanks to the software. The book itself makes for wonderful reading, with many inventions likely to affect us in our lifetimes. Some more exotic ones, my son will enjoy and I hope that he will, in the next decade, read the book with as much interest as I just have.

I couldn't finish this book.