F. M. Esfandiary
Bio: "FM-2030, a noted author, lecturer and consultant to business and industry died on July 8, 2000. FM was born with a conventional name but changed both his first and last names to reflect his beliefs and his confidence in the future. As he explains, "conventional names define a person's past: ancestry, ethnicity, nationality, religion. I am not who I was ten years ago and certainly not who I will be in twenty years. The name 2030 reflects my conviction that the years around 2030 will be a magical time ... In 2030 we will be ageless and everyone will have an excellent chance to live forever. 2030 is a dream and a goal."
His childhood was spent in consulates, embassies and government outposts around the world. He was equally at home in London, New York, Miami, Jerusalem, Damascus and Los Angeles. His formal education began in an Iranian primary school, continued in an English school, a French Jesuit school in Jerusalem, and a term in a girl's convent school in Lebanon where he was the only boy. In the late 40s after attending schools in Europe he went to the United States and attended Berkeley, then U.C.L.A. He came to London in 1948 as a member of the Iranian team at the Olympic Games. FM served at the United Nations on the Conciliation Commission for Palestine, later leaving to devote his time to writing.
Day of Sacrifice, FM's first novel, was selected by the New York Herald Tribune as one of the best novels of 1959. It has been translated into eleven languages and is on the required reading list of the U.S. State Department. In an interview with FM the writer noted: " ... But there is a difference between Esfandiary and Camus. The latter is essentially a pessimist. It is the human condition that is absurd. Esfandiary is an optimist. He has hope, because he has a deep faith in man. He is convinced that technological progress, the contact of cultures, etc ... . will free man from his present miseries. Given time, man will even deliver himself from his supreme tragedy --- death. Man can be made perfect."
FM moved from writing novels to writing non-fiction, changing his name along the way, and dealing with the human condition and the central themes which engaged him throughout his life.
FM appeared many times on network programs such as : The Today Show, Good Morning America, Live with Larry King, Future Watch, Not for Women Only and many others.
His views and forecasts were both provocative and visionary and uncannily right on the mark. At the time he made his forecasts both in his books and in the media they were controversial and viewed as impossible. Now we take many of them for granted. Just an example of some of his forecasts: in the 1970s and 1980s as everyone was concerned with the weapons race and security, FM's projections showed the reasons for the de-acceleration of the arms race; as early as the 1970s he anticipated the breakdown of communism; while the Club de Rome and others made dire predictions, worrying about and raising alarms regarding scarcity of energy, resources, food and water, FM in an article published in The New York Times wrote about the Age of Abundance; in the early 70s he carried out and anticipated our current dress down mode; his book "Telespheres" anticipated telemedicine, teleducation, telebanking, etc.; as early as 1974 he was lecturing and writing articles about physical longevity and the possibility of physical immortality.
Alvin Toeffler, a friend and colleague of FM's since the early 1960s, says about FM: "He is gutsy and truly a visionary ... One doesn't have to agree with everything he says to be refreshed by it."
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