Oracles of history

Nostradamus, the hero of Chapter 6, may be the most famous of all prognosticators. A secret Jew in Catholic France, he studied Islamic medical texts, from which he learned unusually safe and effective ways to treat bubonic plague. His career as a physician, however, ended in accusations of heresy. Fleeing, he undertook a new and, one would think, more dangerous career as an oracle. Using astrology, meditation and other techniques that Krull leaves obscure, he summoned up visions of the future and shaped them into verse. He's credited with naming correct dates for the great fire of London, the French Revolution, the birth of Louis Pasteur and the rise of Adolf Hitler. When he wrote, "A very great plague will come with a great scab. Relief near but the remedies far away," was he referring to AIDS? Is "the nine set apart ... their fate determined on departure" a reference to the Challenger shuttle explosion? I doubt it, but 10-year-olds may prefer to believe.

Chapters on Jules Verne and H.G. Wells explore a different kind of vision of the future. These men of letters weren't making predictions, exactly -- they were writing fiction. In fact, they're credited with inventing the genre of science fiction. It wasn't their fault that some of their inventions have been coming true. Or was it? Wells imagined the radio, VCRs, TVs, superhighways, nuclear war. Verne described submarine travel and manned flight to the moon. Scientists and explorers such as Adm. Richard Byrd and Wernher von Braun were fans. Perhaps, suggests Krull, the authors indirectly affected the future through their writings.

Wells' greatest contribution to juvenile literature may be the time machine. This useful concept shows up, trailing paradoxes, in children's favorites from the Danny Dunne series to Saturday morning cartoons. E. Nesbit, author of such inspired Edwardian children's classics as "The Railway Children," was a close friend of Wells (until he tried to run away with her husband's illegitimate daughter Rosamund, whom Nesbit was raising). It's no coincidence that Nesbit's fantasy novel "The Story of the Amulet" uses a time-travel device. The protagonists, four English schoolchildren and their baby brother, find an ancient, magical amulet that takes them, for the most part, to the past. One chapter, however, envisions a glorious future, with clean cities, justice, economic equality and sensible clothing for boys and girls. In the socialist utopian London of the future, the children meet a little boy named Wells, "after the great reformer -- surely you've heard of him? He lived in the dark ages, and he saw that what you ought to do is find out what you want and then try to get it ... We've got a great many of the things he thought of ..."

Unlike Nesbit and Wells, Krull satisfies herself with the past; she makes no attempt to see the future herself. Who will be the seers of the next millennium? What will they predict and will any of their visions come true? Who knows? But one prediction seems safe enough -- that people won't soon lose their fascination with knowing the future, no matter what the year or how many fingers they use to calculate it.

• View blog reactions