A Future Askew

Publishing November 2026 | Hardcover | 216 pages

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The future we were promised is vanishing.

Sixty years ago, Star Trek gave us a blueprint for who we could become: a species that outgrew its worst instincts and reached the stars with reason, courage, and conscience. Today, we’re further from that future than the day the show first aired—and almost no one is asking why.

In this groundbreaking collection of essays, writer and filmmaker Jeffrey Morris holds Gene Roddenberry’s vision up against the world we’ve actually built—and refuses to look away. It’s part warning, part reckoning, and part stubborn act of hope—the kind of book that makes you furious, then makes you think.

Each chapter opens with a piece of original science fiction, then pulls back to reveal the real and urgent truth behind it:

• What an artifact drifting between the stars reveals about the future of civilization

• How the screen in your hand became the most effective assimilation in history

• Why the billionaires are bringing to outer space our oldest instinct: conquest

• What it means to build a machine with a 20 percent chance of ending us all

• How everything it took generations to build can be dismantled in months

• What we’d really do if we finally discovered we weren’t alone in the universe

• And the choice still left to us—before the window closes forever

Jeffrey Morris has spent his whole life believing in the future we were promised—the one where humanity grows up, reaches the stars, and strives to become something better than its worst instincts. He built his life around that belief. And he’s watched, year after year, as the world drifted further from it instead of closer.

A Future Askew is what happens when a lifelong optimist stops pretending. It’s not the work of a cynic or a doomsayer—it’s the impassioned voice of someone who wants a positive future badly enough to tell the truth about why we’re losing our chance to attain it. While there’s still time to choose differently.

Jeffrey Morris is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, and designer whose thirty-five-year career spans the realms of film, publishing, and science education. A Future Askew is the first in a series of books exploring science, civilization, and the future. Its sequel, titled A Future Aloft: Speculative Essays Inspired by a New Sci-Fi Vision, is forthcoming in 2027.

His documentary The Eagle Obsession—featuring William Shatner and Apollo 16 astronaut Gen. Charles Duke—has won fourteen awards across six countries. He co-authored the sci-fi epic Persephone, based on his original screenplay, with NYT-bestselling author Kevin J. Anderson. He brought cinematic storytelling to educational initiatives at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the International Space University, and Lockheed Martin, in addition to directing for Prince at Paisley Park.

Morris grew up during the promise of the Apollo era and was raised by African American trailblazers—an aerospace engineer father and a librarian mother. He's intellectually rooted in the works of Carl Sagan, Gene Roddenberry, Jacques Cousteau, and Syd Mead. Politically homeless by conviction, his framework for change is civilizational as opposed to political.

To learn more about the book and author, visit rationalbooks.com.  

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