The English writer Simon Ings is fascinated by the future, by how we imagine it, and by humanity’s self-destructive attempts to hasten or escape it. As a popular science writer, he is the author of two non-fiction books: one about the eye, the other about science under Soviet Communism. He has also published more than a half-dozen novels, lushly written if sometimes challengingly modernistic, that frequently take up themes from science fiction.