ColbyCosh.com

In Thursday morning's Post I have a 1,500-word feature that represents the closest thing to speculative fiction I have yet written. It's a view of one possible future seen from the perspective of Wikipedia in the year 2047, and it shows the hive mind trying to come to grips with an unexpected epoch of global peace. It puts a final contrarian cork upon a special Post series in which four other writers try to imagine the next great instance of human strife, so you may wish to read the pieces in order, starting with Hillel Halkin's account of the 2014 Arab-Israeli War and moving to George Jonas's frontline report from the 2025 Euro-American War, Daniel Pipes' vision of a near-future American intifada, and the mighty John O'Sullivan's imaginative scenario in which humble Fort McMurray ultimately does in Russia as a great power.

An interpretive note: my picture of the future should be regarded as a map, not a prediction. Optimists can take comfort in the fact that I am certainly right about some positive trends that we don't pay enough attention to in worrying about the day-to-day state of the world. Pessimists will look at the article and be terrified—as I was sometimes in writing it—at just how much has to go right for the world to catch a breather from major war.