With millennial angst and optimism the two prevailing inclinations of our day, David Wilson’s The History of the Future could not be more timely. A professor of Celtic Studies and History at the University of Toronto, Wilson introduces an overwhelming range of prophets, witches, apocalyptic cults, and dreamers of utopias. It is a cast of characters that amply demonstrates his principal argument: predictions about the future reveal more about the present age in which they are made.

Prophets like Nostradamus, Jules Verne, Ayn Rand, and Richard Brothers are shown to be good barometers of popular superstition, bigotry, insecurity, and religious fervour. Brothers, a Newfoundland-born 18th-century prophet who claimed to have exchanged words with God and had a popular following in England, managed to inspire an exodus from London, which was to receive Divine Judgment. In more recent years we have witnessed the collective self-destruction of Quebec’s Order of the Solar Temple, the death of Branch Davidians at Waco, and those who believed the birthmark on Mikhail Gorbachev’s foreheadmarks him as the Antichrist.

Wilson attempts to lighten a chronology that would otherwise be gloomy with episodes of charismatic prophets leading their followers into massacres with some amusing reflections on their hubris, most often manifest in an ill-fated choice of date for the coming apocalypse, or a bad choice of Antichrist. Sometimes this light touch can be a bit jarring, interrupting the flow of what might be mistaken for academic prose. Yet for all its detailed explanations of Irish folklore and its nuanced readings of Louis-Sebastian Mercier’s L’An 2440 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, this is a quick and witty guide to a long obsession with the future.