Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines and Tomorrow's Music Today is a wide‑angle chronicle of music’s long affair with the future. Drawing on several decades of writing, Simon Reynolds examines the genres, scenes and singular figures who have used electronics to push pop beyond its present tense, turning studios, clubs and bedrooms into laboratories for speculative sound. Rather than offering a simple chronology of technology, he focuses on the feedback loop between science‑fiction imagination and musical innovation, showing how utopian fantasies and dystopian fears have continually reshaped our sense of what music can be.

From the lush, mechanised disco of Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer to the hauntological smears of Boards of Canada, from the spectral urbanity of Burial to the jazz‑inflected collages of Flying Lotus, Reynolds threads together dozens of case studies into an exhilarating narrative of “tomorrow’s music today.” He pays close attention to the hardware and software that enabled each shift – sequencers, drum machines, samplers, DAWs – but never lets the story collapse into gear worship. Instead, he keeps returning to the febrile creativity of artists and scenes, examining how new tools are seized on to express altered states, reimagine the body, or conjure alien environments out of sub‑bass and hiss.

Organised roughly chronologically from the 1970s to the present, the book moves across synth‑pop, techno, electro, IDM, bass music and beyond, with interviews and essays that illuminate both heroes and forgotten outliers. Futuromania also reflects on why certain sounds feel “futuristic” at specific moments, and what happens when yesterday’s future becomes today’s nostalgia. The result is both a guided tour through a lifetime of electronic listening and a meditation on how music helps us rehearse for worlds not yet here – and sometimes learn to live with the ones that arrive.