My friend Yorick Blumenfeld, who has died aged 91, was a prolific writer and futurologist with more than 25 books and 2,000 articles to his name.
In the early 1960s, at the height of the cold war and worried by the risk of nuclear annihilation, Yorick and his wife, Helaine, travelled 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, Yorick’s experiences there inspired his novel Jenny, My Diary (1981), which topped the British bestseller list for eight weeks and was translated into 32 languages.
Yorick’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.
He was an advocate for a post-capitalist society, and his 2004 book Dollars or Democracy argued for a technology-driven, democratic alternative to capitalism, emphasising cooperation and ecological sustainability.
Born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Yorick was the youngest of the three children of Lena (nee Citroen) and the German photographer Erwin Blumenfeld. Yorick grew up in France before fleeing from the Nazis to New York with his parents, brother, Henry, and sister, Lisette, in 1941.
When Yorick arrived in the US, he did not speak a word of English. After Columbia grammar and preparatory school, he was admitted to Harvard University to study English literature and Russian and subsequently made a career of writing in English. His senior thesis argued that censorship fuelled global creativity, a theme that would underpin his future works.
After postgraduate study at the London School of Economics, he moved to Washington DC to take up a post as an editorial research reporter at Congressional Quarterly. In 1962 he married Helaine Becker, whom he had met in a New York bookshop; she went on to become a sculptor.
After the end of the Philia community, he was taken on as a journalist after a chance meeting with Philip Graham, owner of the Washington Post, which also published Newsweek. Yorick 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 towards writing books.
In 1969 he and Helaine settled in the UK, living in Grantchester, near Cambridge, Their home was full of laughter and joy and they were known for holding great parties, hosting the widest mix of people, of old friends and new.
He is survived by Helaine, their sons Remy and Jared, and two grandchildren, Marcus and Anya, and his brother, Henry.
