"Predicting the future may be a thing of the past."

There’s a heavy dose of nostalgia in the proceedings, and it’s not just about bringing back an old name. Longtime editor Ben Bova has described Omni as "a magazine about the future," but since his time as editor, our vision of the future has been tarnished — or, at the very least, we’ve started looking at the predictions of the past with rose-tinted glasses. Evans, for one, echoes the common fear that we’ve stopped dreaming of a better time. "I think Omni was very skewed towards this idea of convenience, leisure, enhanced ability, enhanced freedom, and sexuality," she says. "The discourse about technology that we have now is much more 'What is it doing to us? How is it affecting our society? How is it affecting the way we deal with the world?'"

Writer Ken Baumann, who is contributing an essay to the first issue, questions even the idea of looking forward. "It's getting harder and harder to actually predict in a real way what the future will look like," he says, "because complex systems get really messy, and ours is more complex and more entropic than ever. Predicting the future may be a thing of the past." But if he had to do it? He references George Carlin: the planet is fine, the people are fucked. "I don't think we deal with complexity very well, and I think that's increasingly dangerous, but I don't think we're bad on the face of it. I just think we're beautiful little fools with nice and powerful tools."

Was the future, though, ever really that good? The cyberpunk future of William Gibson — whose work first appeared in Omni with "Johnny Mnemonic" in May 1981 — wasn’t purely dystopian, but it offered a bleak, cynical take on corporations and technology. "People were taking it as a dystopian thing because they were living in a freakin' dream world," says Bruce Sterling, who will also appear in the first issue. "They had no idea what was actually happening." And the 1960s, a "high-water mark of space age ecstatic exhilaration," weren’t a golden era. "If you were actually alive in the 1960s, especially if you were a right wing person, it was a very very frightening time in many ways, and many people were in deadly fear of the future."