Copyright � 2026 by Shane
Tourtellotte
If my observations on paradoxes have gotten you a little gun-shy, you may be turning your vision in a new direction (or maybe you had it there all along). There are, after all, two directions leading from the present. If the danger, or the squalor, of the past deters you, there’s always the future. Who could resist looking at the bright times ahead, witnessing the marvels days to come have in store1?
That means it’s time for me to be a wet blanket upon the other half of your dreams. Traveling to the future is not an untroubled trip. Not necessarily for over-optimism about what the future holds, but definitely because the dangers you face there are, from your current perspective, not just unknown but unknowable.
For traveling to the past, we can figure out many of the pitfalls ahead. An entire upcoming section of this book is dedicated to doing that in specific cases, and to training you to do it for yourself in general ones. Not everything is foreseeable: even the less fragmentary histories can never be truly comprehensive, meaning something will always fall through the cracks. Granted that, you can still prepare well for most cases, and cultivate a flexible mindset to carry you across any potholes.
The future is different, the road ahead obscured to us. You don’t know what will be different, or how it will be different. You cannot guess how people will dress, so your first appearance before others could mark you as bafflingly weird or worse2. Your stumbling ignorance of other customs of your future destination could put you quickly in trouble. Worse, acting like you have rights that have contracted in the interim -- or objecting to someone else acting a certain way where rights have expanded -- can get you crosswise with the law.
Sticking out from others, appearing like you don’t belong, is a risk when visiting the past. When exploring the future, it is close to a certainty if you interact with more than a thin handful of people.
There are two ways to lessen your ignorance. The first is to go to the future anyway, and learn as much as possible while exposing yourself as little as possible. You’d be acting like a scout, or a spy, in enemy territory. While there’s a certain thrill to this, plus the practical benefit of gathering knowledge that you can use for future trips, it is a hard and hazardous road to travel.
This might push you toward the second option: letting someone else do the work. You can seek out other travelers into the future, ask them what they encountered, and learn from their experience. You might have to ply them with drinks, or dinners, or more drinks, to get their stories, but that’s nothing that wouldn’t be needed with other adventurers willing both to tell their tales and extract a price for them.
The problem with this? What you learn is likely to be fragmentary, missing a lot of the things that vitally interest you. It’s bound to be biased and self-interested. It may well be a tissue of lies, spun by the tale-teller to make himself look knowledgeable, perceptive, and otherwise outstanding.
You think recorded history is unreliable? Actually, it often is, in very similar ways. The saving grace there is frequent access to multiple sources than can help you cancel out the lies and mistakes. It will be a lot harder finding multiple time-travelers to the future you’re hoping to learn about.
Perhaps we should turn back to that first option: playing undercover agent in the future. “Playing” is the wrong word, though. This won’t be a glamorous James Bond adventure, not if you want to avoid the very exposure your mission is meant to avoid. You’ll be on your opponent’s turf, and they have real and sizable advantages, mainly grounded in technology.
Public surveillance has made immense bounds forward in the past couple decades, and it’s a fool who assumes it won’t keep doing so in the future. As I write this paragraph, facial recognition software that can pick you out of a crowd is held and used not only by governments but by private companies, working on behalf of governments or for their own purposes. Tracing of smartphones, itself a technology only a couple decades old, is close to routine now, many users not just acceding but willingly participating in their own surveillance. Take this ubiquity of observation, extrapolate it ten or twenty years, and imagine jumping blindly into that near future.
If some authority figure in a future you’re visiting thinks there’s something suspicious about you, you could be woven into a web you would not even be able to see. Functionaries in dark offices could trace your movements back to when you first appeared in their sight, and thus figure out where you’ve secreted your time machine. If you get wise and try to evade them, you won’t know where the watching eyes are, except maybe to assume they’re everywhere. If you try to flee the city you’re visiting, you’ll almost certainly be observed, and risk being detained, at any and all exit points. If you do leave, you could still have a drone aircraft the size of a dragonfly following you. All of this assumes they aren’t just tied into that little computer you’re carrying in your pocket or pack.
You could leave the smartphone home -- presumably it’s a dinosaur in this era -- but that could just be another way of hemming yourself in. In our time, there are already economic transactions that can be awkward if you don’t have a smartphone, or some other up-to-date piece of technology like chipped credit or debit cards, or a palmprint tied into your complete biometric database. Move ahead a couple of decades, never mind a couple of centuries, and you’re not going to have the tech, or the extant database, to make easy transactions.
Want to pay with cash? Leave inflation issues to the side for a second: how sure are you that they’ll have cash, even in the near future3? If you luck out and they still do, who knows if there are above-board ways to sell or pawn something for ready cash that don’t require forms of identification or authorization that you don’t possess? There will be black-market methods, with the attendant risks of law enforcement busts and the certainty of an exchange rate that grossly benefits the black marketeers. This assumes you can find those people.
Making your appearance in a sparsely populated area is starting to look better, beyond the safety and security concerns of popping into a dense city. Surveillance will be less ubiquitous in the hinterlands. The newest technology will likely be penetrating more slowly, so older and more convenient (to you, that is) ways of doing business will persist.
This will be less risky, but don’t conclude it will be risk-free. For one matter, an out-of-the-way place doesn’t always remain so. As a recent example, the North Dakota oil boom of the 2010s turned a number of small, sleepy towns into big, bustling towns within a few years. You probably won’t stumble into such a situation, but “probably” is not “certainly,” and the longer a trip you make into the future, the more tickets you’re buying in that lottery.
There is also the hazard of being an unfamiliar face in a small community. A tight-knit place where everyone knows everyone else can foster a “you ain’t from ‘round here, are you?” reaction, especially if you look like somebody from the kind of place they distrust or outright scorn. This can be handled if you figure out the situation quickly enough, or they might instead make it worthwhile to keep on moving. Finding a place properly situated between thronged city and speck on the map is probably your best course.
Once you’re in that happy medium of a community, it’s time to start gathering that intelligence that was the point of your scouting trip. This is doable by several channels, though not all of them are fully straightforward. For the relatively near future, there is one obvious resource to tap: public libraries.
Libraries as we know them in the early 21st century, municipally controlled and free to the public, aren’t that old an institution. Venture far enough into the future, and you may discover they have been supplanted, or have evolved enough that they are no longer the accessible and reliable sources of information we expect. In the more recent future, and especially in those less crowded areas which may be expected to trail behind big societal shifts, things should remain closer to what you know today.
Computers with Internet access should be common or even universal there, but access could be restricted to those with library cards. You probably don’t have the valid identification to apply for one, so you would have to settle for using its paper resources4. For a diligent investigator, this should still suffice.
Almanacs and yearbooks are waning in reach, but libraries should still stock them enough that you can get a feel for the recent past by studying them. Newspapers and magazines, to whatever extent they still exist, will be right there for the reading, and can get you oriented with current events in short order. The shelves devoted to newly acquired books will offer hints about the current zeitgeist, though this can be stretched too far. Seeing what authors well-known to you persist or have been supplanted will give their own clues about the trajectory of the culture and society, though again it’s perilous to judge too broadly from one library in one town.
A rich lode, of course, will lie in the history section. Writers trying to pen the authoritative takes on recent happenings will be immensely informative, quite possibly giving you events to visit as a time tourist. If they’re the kind of authors who like setting those events in historical context, you could get a surprisingly broad perspective on those times -- or possibly just a flood of silly minutiae, which could still be very informative in its way.
How much should you trust these books, and newspapers and magazines? Isn’t there a risk that you’ll get a distorted picture, from unconscious groupthink or personal biases or outright organizational propaganda, or overlaps of all of these5?
There is certainly a likelihood you will encounter this, perhaps so uniformly as to act as a party line. What you make of it depends on your intentions. If you’re trying to form an objective history of the future, you may be picking your way through a mire, and there may be no safe crossing.
If you’re trying to learn enough to pass in this future age without attracting undue attention -- if you are, as I described earlier, playing undercover agent -- you can use this information a different way. The narratives you get from these newspapers and other sources are telling you not only how some people look at the world, but how they want and expect you to look at it. You can satisfy them. It’s not necessary to believe everything they tell you, but it may be practical to appear as if you do.
This won’t be universally applicable. If the sources giving you this view are local to where you’re visiting, you’re probably okay. If the view comes from big-name sources at far removes, local opinion may not mesh that well. Hopefully your spy mission won’t require you to linger a very long time to get your information, but assume that it may, and be prepared to be flexible in how you interact.
Of course, the big news and political currents of the day aren’t all that you’re trying to learn. Note how other people dress and talk, so you can emulate them when you return on your ‘official’ trip6. Look over restaurants in the local town, so you spot any dietary shifts that have occurred. And if you spot any surveillance devices, don’t smile and wave, no matter how friendly you want to appear to be.
Footnotes:
Or maybe you just want to find out if Eloi taste like chicken. They don’t. Don’t ask me how I know.
You may think you can guess, perhaps by extrapolation. To disabuse you of this, look at science fiction movies or programs from the latter 1960’s and early 1970’s that tried to imagine how people of around today, or the recent past which was to them still the future, would dress. The groovier guesses are hilarious. Maybe the closest hit was Stanley Kubrick in 2001, who barely changed anything from the more square fashions of his present day. Take this as a guide to your own attempts. It might help.
Maybe this explains all those science-fictional futures (looking at you, post-1960s Star Trek) where they no longer have money. Writers have confused the concepts of money and cash, and it is the tangible units of exchange that have become obsolete, rather than the system of exchange.
Microfilmed copies of newspapers and magazines used to be a common resource at libraries, but the Internet Age has rendered them obsolete or at best redundant. Even if you find a library with such resources, their stocks are likely to stop before our current day, giving you no information about what is to you the future.
One caution: if you find multiple sources disagreeing over the facts, that’s disquieting. If they agree on facts and clash over interpretations, that’s reassuring. If they agree on facts and differ only on which facet of the same interpretation should have predominance, that’s very disquieting.
The magazines stocked at the library may show some current fashions in their advertisements, but haute couture is probably not what you’re looking to copy. Pay more attention to the more humdrum stuff in more mainstream ads. As for talking, be very cautious about trying to adopt new slang. I’ll have more to say about such things later.
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