Dutch-born British author Yorick Blumenfeld, "a prolific writer and futurologist with more than 25 books and 2,000 articles to his name," died April 8, the Guardian reported. He was 91. In the early 1960s, at the height of the cold war and worried by the risk of nuclear annihilation, Blumenfeld and his wife, Helaine, traveled to the South Pacific with a group of friends and founded Philia, an international community near Nelson, New Zealand.
"I was very concerned... particularly when the Cuban missile crisis took place, about our chances of survival," he said. "That led me to think that I want to go to a place such as New Zealand which I thought might have a good chance of escaping a nuclear attack and fallout around the world."
Although the community did not last, his experiences there inspired the novel Jenny, My Diary (1981), which topped the British bestseller list for eight weeks and was translated into 32 languages.
When the Philia community ended, Blumenfeld worked as a journalist after a chance meeting with Philip Graham, owner of the Washington Post, which also published Newsweek. He started as a cultural correspondent based in Paris, and in 1965 opened the first eastern European bureau for the magazine. See Saw: Cultural Life in Eastern Europe (1968) chronicled his experiences and he shifted his focus toward writing books.
Blumenfeld's later career was marked by his engagement with imagining the future. 2099: A Eutopia (1999) presented a vision of a techno-future shaped by cooperative and non-violent ideals, mediated by mechanical intelligence. Dollars or Democracy (2004) argued for a technology-driven, democratic alternative to capitalism, emphasizing cooperation and ecological sustainability, the Guardian wrote.