John Naughton has written a book whose heroes are the visionaries who laid the foundations of the postmodern world. A Brief History of the Future celebrates the engineers and scientists who implemented their dreams in hardware and software and explains the values and ideas that drove them. Although its subject seems technical, the book in fact in personal. John Naughton writes about the Net the way Nick Hornby writes about soccer - as a part of life, and as a key influence on his own voyage from solitary child to established academic and writer. A Brief History of the Future is an intimate celebration of vision and altruism, ingenuity and determination, and above all of the power of ideas to change the world.