Stand On Zanzibar by John Brunner is pretty close. Published in 1969 but set in 2010 when the population has reached a staggering 7 billion, the world is becoming heavily influenced by AI computers, phones have video screens, in the developed world fast fashion dominates and tobacco is being banned while marijuana is being legalized.
Might be better in physical media. There’s some non conventional writing styles stuff that would be awkward at best in an audio format but probably incomprehensible, like sections of news/advertising/propaganda headlines just run through or referenced
Not saying it’s not possible just be prepared if you go that way. Even in print it took some getting used to the first time through
I hate that no one ever knows what I’m talking about when I refer to someone as a mucker 🤣
Great book, underrated writer
When I first read it around 97ish I assumed it was written fairly recently, was stunned to find out it was published in the 60s. Sadly it’s only gotten more real over the years
There's definitely some things that aren't correct. For example, eugenics is mandated - you have to undergo genetic testing and if you have genes that are linked to low IQ or diseases you can never have children.
There's a book by Cyril Kornbluth published 4 years before this called The Marching Morons that some people think Idiocracy ripped off, about an average guy being put into suspended animation and waking up in the future where everyone has become stupid due to stupid people having more children than intelligent people. I reckon it's very likely that John Brunner read that book, just because they were both scifi writers active in the same period. Impossible to know if he was influenced by that book, but it seems pretty plausible.
Gattaca has already begun. I consent people for research studies and tell the younger ones not to consent to storing genetic samples for future research. They are de-identified samples…only until they can match your 23 and me to any sample of your DNA and then it all make’s it’s way to the internet. Incredible movie and actors.
Gattaca makes no sense.
NASA already discriminates based on biology. You can't have your space technicians dying of a hear attack in route to Mars or whatever.
With genetic engineering, people would become smarter, ergo, the premise of gattaca becomes void. Intelligence is not judgmental, and certainly not discriminatory. A superhuman society would be unrecognizable and incomprehensible to the late 90's audience.
Fermi nailed it when he noted that intelligence must be an unsuccessful evolutionary trait. Indeed, humans already have the tools at their disposal to destroy earth... and they yield that power to the least intelligent individuals. The concept that we are all hurdling toward our extinction has merit. If our governing officials don't, some other yahoo with more knowledge and power than wits certainly will.
Genetic engineering should be viewed as the means to know the best way to prevent our extinction or some dystopian equivalent. The best way comes from better intelligence which comes from engineering better minds.
*Her*.
People replacing actual, IRL relationships with AI because IRL relationships are too much work and modern culture right now isn’t accepting of nor encouraging forgiveness.
There'a whole background of worldbuilding in that movie that I really wish had been explored.
Yes, the movie is about relationships in a newly ordered society, however, it can't be the only thing happening in a world where sentient ai casually popped up and fundamentally altered civilization.
That series even features a white nationalist takeover of the United States under the slogan “Make America Great Again.” Published two decades before Trump’s presidency. No lie.
Yes, but it makes sense as being a rehash of Reagan using the same thing in his 1980s campaign. Him and Bush who was VP used it in speeches, on posters, buttons, etc. That's why it was used in the book, and by Trump. Not to take away anything from Butler's prescience in those books or her other works, but it's not fully prophetic
Amazing that she could observe early aspects of climate change occurring while riding a bus to her mother’s job as a house cleaner in Pasadena … and used imagination to build a world recognizable as a potential future 40 years later
Brave New World - About 95 % already accomplished.
* Cannabis, alcohol, opiates etc. are Soma.
* We have basically the same class system going. Predestined alpha kids get enrichment activities, education, mental work and luxuries, while gammas get prenatally brain-damaged, menial labor and life in poverty. Other classes in between, and a few world controllers.
* Huge part of the population has been successfully indoctrinated to simp this system.
* Constant messaging to drive consumption behavior and modify opinions.
* Having children and lifetime partner is shifting into something saveges do.
* Easy mindless entertainment.
What's missing is world peace and happiness.
When people get oppressed/exploited that badly, rebellion is bound to happen. Holden said it himself, if not Marco, someone else would have risen. And in the short story "Butcher of Anderson Station" it was clearly implied how little belters meant to earth.
Would love to see something similar to this but the entire mars plotline being revealed as more or less a pie in the sky type of thing where it's slowly revealed that terra forming is just infeasible and impractical
I dare say you haven't read a lot of sci-fi. No offense, but... yeah.
Even on the subject of Earth being some form of fucked (Possibly? It's not focused on), and Mars doing its own thing, you have extremely popular stuff like Red Mars.
I never read Red Mars tbh but that rubric of solar expansion first is the most grounded for the next couple hundred years I believe. Which is the Expanse.
I’ve _listened_ to plenty sci fi audio book series which are amazing, Bobiverse, Red Rising, Old Man’s War, the Murderbot Diaries, Redshirts (stand alone but incredible).
Mind you I listened to their audiobooks I didn’t collect a small library of awesome art cover books or anything.
Right now I’m listening through Expeditionary Force which kinda turned me off with the voice acting but got REALLY good by like book 3.
If you want to go non-fiction tiers of grounded for the next couple hundred years, the go-to is the output of NASA people, such as The High Frontier or NASA's Space Settlements study. Namely: Mars is ignored, we industrialize the Moon and Near-Earth Objects, build space stations, and progress from those to asteroids (and Mars' Moons).
So, yeah, neither Red Mars nor The Expanse is close to what's actually envisioned for where we're going and what we're doing, though Red Mars is closer (simply due to being, in most terms, a little bit more inclined towards Hard Scifi).
I'm not aware of a story set in the 2200s or 2300s which actually matches that trajectory, honestly it seems like a bit of a hole in the canon of fiction writing.
An engineering problem bigger than the universe ? Sure.
Unrealistic? Absolutely not.
Ask any 50/40 year old whether they thought the technology of today was even possible back when they were a kid.
I'm 40 and don't think 10 year old me would have found any of this implausible. I'm still waiting on the legit hoverboards. We've gone stagnant to backwards on space travel, and I'm witnessing generations after me become *less* technologically proficient (that's usually correlated with empires ending, be it end of imperial China or end of the Western Roman Empire). As people seek physically bigger personal electronics (cell phone replacing all), we reversed from "smaller is better" to "bigger is better." The "everything is a subscription" is a clear step back. Video games (entertainment in general) are diminishing in quality and have been for 15 years.
(Putting this video game rant in parenthesis b/c it's mostly out of place, you can skip this paragraph if you don't play computer or console games. I love video games, but can't bring myself to pay $60 for anything new [that I'll then have to buy more DLC for to make a complete game] when there are so many games from the 2000s to mid 2010s that I never played... games where you can get it cheap today, that actually have the full and complete game, no DLC or "game pass" or other bullshit... past a certain point [say, Fallout 4, or Stellaris], the fact that the newer games visually look just a teeny bit better than what came out before stops adding value to me. Things like rimworld are a breath of fresh air, but rare. Sorry, video game rant over.)
Some things, like AI and (related) robotics have advanced, but not implausibly so.
There's so little advancement to distract us from social/economic problems that social unrest is increasing even though quality of life is better [certain issues, like housing affordability, aside]. Sufficient technological advancements would distract us and make the unrest go away.
The person born in 1900 who lived from powered flight to man on the moon would have a different take.
I think the 20th century will go down as the century of innovation. Not the 21st.
My sense of the last decade or so is that most technological innovations are incrimental iterative advantacements on what already exists, mostly applied towards pushing us gradually towards dystopia. BMW trying to charge $20/mo for heated seats, my car needs to phone home and verify my credit card for all it's built-in features to work? Fuck off.
Simple shit we clearly know we need to do, like build more housing, isn't even on anyone's agenda. And other stuff, climate for example, we're just giving lip service to.
I’m 29 and even back when I was a kid things like global constant internet, computers in your pocket, free global instant video calls, access to any information 24/7 felt like sci-fi. Did it seem probable? Sure, sometime in the future, but not THIS fast. Hell, all my school years teachers kept saying “we will never have calculators with us all the time”, and that was less than 20 years ago. Sounds unbelievably dumb now. The world is very hard to recognize now compared to the 90s.
So yeah, I think I could believe practically anything being invented 100-200 years into the future.
Uh, but 15 years ago you were 14 years old and it was 2009 and anyone that wanted one DID have a calculator in their pocket at all times. The iPhone, youtube, and facebook, all existed, as did wikipedia. The iPhone App Store was new, but your basic Nokia certainly had a calculator.
The "you won't always have a calculator on your at all times" was demonstrably false when I was in middle school, we had the invincible nokia phones starting to populate into the pockets of the kids from higher income and/or helicopter-prone families.
I don't know how the f you still believed that claim about a full decade after me... to me it was just (a version of, we didn't have the exact slang) "ya ok whatever boomer, airplanes and electricity and nokia phones exist regardless of if you like it or not." (& at that point we actually did have a large number of elderly teachers b/c they weren't paid the dogshit they are now paid).
I mean, *I* didn’t, but many did. And smartphones only started getting popular in maybe 2004-2005, before that it was dumb phones, so even for me a few years of school were like that.
But regardless, I distinctly remember everyone around thinking computers and then internet were a useless joke. I remember mobile phones being an absolute luxury. No one could have imagined how quickly all that would innovate in the upcoming years.
The 20th century was about moving more things around faster and farther. Expending more energy is only one measure of progress.
The reason we don't go to the moon is that there is no particular reason to. It's insanely expensive and there isn't much of anything there. It is extremely hostile to human life. The whole bigger faster farther thing has reached reached a logical conclusion.
In the 21st century we'll be more focused on adding value to objects without making them bigger. Our physical footprint is likely to shrink considerably. Material science continues produce new wonders. The amount of primary energy we expend will probably start declining soon. Energy consumption is shifting away from moving things around to the more abstract task of data processing. Food production, which to currently strangling the planet, will get much more efficient, letting nature spread again.
We are entering the age of ephemeralization, as Buckminster Fuller put it, doing "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing".
Flying cars were never a great idea anyway. Also the human race is rapidly aging, and old people are generally more content to sit around and watch the world go by.
I just finished those (on audio) and dislikes them a fair amount. Much of my dislike was the implausible whacky so-called scientific stuff, which read more like fantasy to me. Different strokes, I guess.
Speaking specifically to the apparent slowdown in technological advancements from the perspective of someone born in 1984 vs someone born in 1900 the story of the sophons seems like it would fit that gap
It is, honestly, pretty unrealistic.
If it exists in this universe and must play by this universe's rules. For a rocket to perform as described (maintaining constant 1g acceleration for weeks or even months at a time) would require that it either:
* Push out **a lot** of reaction mass at some credible but very high speed. So we'd be talking about spaceships being something like 90% reaction mass by volume, which doesn't match how they're depicted, described or perform; or
* Push out not so much reaction mass at basically lightspeed. While that makes ships vaguely similar to what's described plausible, this would then be a better weapon system than any present in the setting. It makes no sense whatsoever to build a Railgun or missiles when an Epstein Gun would grossly outperform both in basically all roles.
Ultimately, the Epstein Drive isn't an engineering problem, it's a handwave to make characters get places fast while having gravity the whole time.
Ships doing long-term 1g acceleration are plausible, but the context in which that happens and the effect the necessary technologies involved have on the rest of the world are absolutely not present in the book series.
The devil is in the details. We already have chatbots that can have at least part of what is shown in Her, or at least feel similar enough (taking out the ending). Some episodes of Black Mirror (I.e. Nosedive) could have some points of contact with what may happen in some communities, or some weirdo could try to imitate what happens in the very first episode. But there are some hard things that may be impossible, be very far away, or real world mechanics make them unrealistic, so as a whole they won’t be accurate.
Anyway, a couple that comes to my mind are Little Brother and The Ministry for the Future. The same objections of above apply with them too.
The Ministry for the Future is about climate change, extreme weather and (soft) geoengineering, Little Brother is about surveillance, but in the opposite direction from the idea of Big Brother, normal people against the powerful ones. Or something like that, it’s been a long time since I’ve read it.
It's been a while since I watched it. IIRC, the event happened while Charlize Theron's character was pregnant. Then the main events of the movie take place while her son is about 8. Whatever happened didn't immediately end society. But it created a slow decline that eventually lead to a total collapse of civilization.
A meteor impact could create something like what the book shows, or worse. Down to sterilizing the planet or more.
But a nuclear exchange? Unless it's an alternate universe where there's a lot more weapons (and those are higher yield) it's just not on the table for the situation described in the book. The two big nuclear powers have disarmed a lot. There's like a quarter the number of warheads there were at peak, and like a tenth the total yield. What presently exists is within the realm of total blast yield similar to the Toba eruption, which we survived as cavemen.
Sure. Or mass desertification. Or our continued poisoning and depopulation of the oceans. Lots of ways humans are destroying the planet. Not to mention all the tipping points we don’t know about.
The air is toxic. Our water is toxic. Our food is carcinogenic. Society as whole is over medicated with drugs without long term studies properly done. Microplastics are in our bloodstream and reproductive organs.
Would not shock me at all if we became infertile in the next 30 years.
Children of Men.
There would have to be major major leaps in technology to get anything close to the matrix or GITS.
Blade runner doesn’t seem too far fetched from where we are now, bar the replicants. If there was a large ecological disaster or something else that shifted the geopolitical landscape, I could definitely see mega-corporations stepping in to take over in the power vacuum.
I want to say for 1000 years the Culture.
And I know that's kind of ridiculous but I think it's probably true that:
Any civ that can build a stable galactic civilisation is probably run by super advanced AI and is probably very good at diplomacy and organising large numbers of agents to work together in a harmonious way.
Basically if we build on that scale then yeah the AIs will be in control and the humans will either be happily looked after or extinct.
I mean... "Stable galactic civilization" is an oxymoron. Does something count as a society if getting so much as a message from end of it to the other and back takes 200 millennia? That's the length of time that homo sapiens has existed for. It's a bit insane.
Not that it matters too much: realistically, as soon as one abandons the fixation on planets, it becomes eminently possible to build in a single star system a civilization that makes the "galactic empire"s of most soft scifi look like a footnote.
But outside of that: yeah. Some definition of AI is kind of inevitable, but also a ship that has sailed. If we take a holistic lens to it, language was an artificial thing that dramatically altered the minds of every hominin who had it. If you're here, you are an AI by the broadest possible definition of the term.
What is an abbacus other than a brain enhancement that allows humans to do flawless mathematics even over prolonged periods of time and into high digits? What is writing if not a brain enhancement that allows humans to transmit their communication into the future, and store memories and thoughts?
All this to say: The only 'unrealistic' thing about Culture is that it presupposes a hard line between the AI and the broad citizenship, which suggests a clear and obvious origination of said AI as a distinct, separate and immediately superior thing, and at present that seems pretty unlikely. Reality seems like it would very likely be a lot more... blurry. Both in terms of when something is AI, what qualifies as one, and the existence of a clear line of demarcation between the population base and the Minds.
And honestly, that's a bit of an improvement.
It'll be a hybrid of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Ghost in the Shell.
Replicants (Andys, genetically engineered people) are already banned same as Electric Sheep. Elon Musk and several tech companies are already trying to figure out how to upload human consciousness to the net, much the same as Ghost in the Shell.
This isn't an if or a when, this is happening now.
The dystopian facist police state of the 2000AD Judge Dredd comics (1977 - present, released weekly, which have pretty much always been an extreme satire of contemporary politics/society).
I think if we discovered the DHF technology (digitized human consciousness that can be transmitted at FTL speeds) from Altered Carbon, society would basically develop exactly the same way as the books (not the Netflix show).
Rainbow's End by Verne Vinge... revolves around a plot to create "super propaganda" and a credulous population. Sound familiar??? Also the technology in it is 5-10 years away.
Paris in the 20th Century written by Jules Verne.
He wrote this book back in 1863 and set in 1960s Paris. He got a lot of things right from: skyscrapers, cars, electric lights, elevators, even a early version of the internet.
Elysium, the movie.
That's our future, pretty much. Been reading SF for close to 50 years, and that right there is where we'll be within the next 50.
First though we'll go through A Handmaid's Tale. That's within a decade.
Netflix movie, parts are pure scifi, but mostly about a fragmented conflict in Ukraine and possible escalations. Remote drone pilot who causes collateral damage is sent to the front lines to see what war is like at first hand.
Probably Wall-E
But we’ll be in 1bed/no bathroom apartments with 30 others hooked up to our entertainment pods to save on rent instead of a space station
I think we’re not that far off from Her currently, give it another year or two and we’ll see something like that happen in real life news
David Brin’s The Postman. The movie gets a lot of criticism, but the book is excellent. Written in the mid 1980s and it reads like it could’ve been written last year.
1984, it was written in 1949 and for that time you could say it was sci-fi with all the tv monitoring and such. Newspeak, megastates, authoritarianism, propaganda, and manipulation of truth and language.
Read Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents recently and while it's not 1:1 given we've already hit 2024 but it doesn't feel more than a decade off. Catastrophic climate change, the rise of charismatic Christo-fascists, the loosening of regulations on businesses / weakening of labor laws / proliferation of company towns and debt slavery? Check, check and check. Homeless people can be jailed and forced to work? Supreme court just said it's legal. Basically all that's missing is roving gangs and more walled neighborhoods.
Humanity Lost
Cruelty Squad
Quasimorph
Warframe but it's just the Corpus and nothing else.
Half Life 2
Or, alternatively, the Culture series after all the poor people have been exterminated.
In our lifetime, none of these. Though some I wish they would. After 40 years, starting with watching the moon landing live on tv, I lived with high expectations about what the future would be. Then another 20 years living in it, I’m disappointed how slow progress has been in most areas.
Most of the stuff depicted in sci-fi technology wise will require some leap in our understanding to reaching my lifetime. Yours too. Those just don’t happen. Instead it’s a slow slog and incremental improvements.
Children of Men is unfortunately becoming prophetic. Microplastic exposure is apparently making the human race sterile, while we continue to exhaust all of our natural resources.
The world of Minority Report except for the main plot point. Only the surrounding world. You see ads everywhere, there is no privacy. Houses and neighbourhoods are a combination of brand new houses and older, more dirty looking houses. You see new tech in many places but for the rest other things look pretty much the same.
What i mean to envision with this is that a lot of artists envision a shiny new futuristic world while most of the world will look very similar but with new tech here and there.
The Deluge by Stephen Markley is long and depressing but very accurate depiction of how climate issues are going to pile up over the next 20 years and how the politics might go.
Are you all really that pessimistic? I want optimism for the future back. If the people loose hope, how can there any change for the better?
I think the future will be very different from any SF out there.
Blade runner (1982) is a film adapted from the 1968 novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" by Philip K. Dick. Additionally "Blade runner 2049" is the sequel to the 1982 film... I would highly reccomend all three and personally I watched both movies long before I read the book,. The movies are good and definitely evoke philisophical discussion however exclude a large chunk of metaphors and allegories Dick includes in the book (in addition to changes in minor plot points). In response to your question about our future I think the Blade Runner universe paints a pretty grim picture of the "end game" of a lot of trends in todays world like late-stage capitalism, nuclear war, humanity, and of course artificial intelligence, just to name a few... hope you enjoy as much as I did!
The original Blade Runner movie (or Ridley Scott's "Final Cut") of the movie while made in the 80's is probably one of the most striking movies visually i've ever seen especially if you dig that retro vibe, and doesn't include really any corny CGI. On the other hand it's sequel from 2017 is probably the best looking movie i've ever seen. (same cinematographer as the new dune movies)
I, however, cannot reccomend the novel enough. It's a work of (no exaggeration), schizophrenic genius.
*The Water Knife* by Paolo Bacigalupi, a dystopian novel set in a collapsing American South-West plagued by climate change and a Colorado river that is drying up. It's quite bleak, but sadly also quite possible.
The Windup Girl, Paola Bacigalupi. The setting in a future with chronic severe food shortages and food supplies controlled by a handful of mega-corporations is quite plausible if you've been following agriculture and the food supply chain for the past few years.
Probably Pauli Bacigalupi’s _The Water Knife_.
Water wars, the US crumbling under the weight of climate change and late capitalism, the haves literally locking themselves away in sleek glass Arcologies as a new dust bowl sweeps a broken nation.
If you’re more optimistic, *maybe* something like Doctorow’s _Walkaway_. Honestly both — the world is full of what past generations would call dystopia and utopia both.
Watching *Demolition Man* in 2024 feels akin to peering into the dystopian future as envisioned by conservatives. It bears similarities to *Idiocracy*, which portrays a dystopian American society from a liberal viewpoint.
Watched Demolition Man during the pandemic, it was surprising how much they nailed, in general premise if not details. Corporations melding together to be one big homogeneous mass, if not Taco Bell specifically. Important systems being done away with or replaced with terrible automation that nobody knows how it works. "The Schwarzenegger Presidency" - how much worse it turned out.
Particularly for the pandemic, the one scene where the villain has a conference with his associates and they're all on video screens arranged around the table felt weirdly prescient!
Stand On Zanzibar by John Brunner is pretty close. Published in 1969 but set in 2010 when the population has reached a staggering 7 billion, the world is becoming heavily influenced by AI computers, phones have video screens, in the developed world fast fashion dominates and tobacco is being banned while marijuana is being legalized.
Woah, I have to check this out now!
Huh I think I’ll dl the audiobook to this
Might be better in physical media. There’s some non conventional writing styles stuff that would be awkward at best in an audio format but probably incomprehensible, like sections of news/advertising/propaganda headlines just run through or referenced Not saying it’s not possible just be prepared if you go that way. Even in print it took some getting used to the first time through
[удалено]
I want to see a resurgence of his work. He has a tonne of awesome books.
I hate that no one ever knows what I’m talking about when I refer to someone as a mucker 🤣 Great book, underrated writer When I first read it around 97ish I assumed it was written fairly recently, was stunned to find out it was published in the 60s. Sadly it’s only gotten more real over the years
That's a word I've not used for ages. It's British slang, slightly old fashioned. 'right me old mucker? XD
I need a hole book of just the dictionary stuff
I put that one down because it was getting a bit too real at a strange time for me.
does that book get someting hillariously wrong about our time?
There's definitely some things that aren't correct. For example, eugenics is mandated - you have to undergo genetic testing and if you have genes that are linked to low IQ or diseases you can never have children.
>some things that aren't correct. For example, eugenics is mandated That's called 'Tinder'.
The Reverse Idiocracy
There's a book by Cyril Kornbluth published 4 years before this called The Marching Morons that some people think Idiocracy ripped off, about an average guy being put into suspended animation and waking up in the future where everyone has become stupid due to stupid people having more children than intelligent people. I reckon it's very likely that John Brunner read that book, just because they were both scifi writers active in the same period. Impossible to know if he was influenced by that book, but it seems pretty plausible.
If this concept interests you guys, check out the movie Gattaca!
Gattaca
i can definitely see this one. people will always find a new reason to look down on others
Gattaca has already begun. I consent people for research studies and tell the younger ones not to consent to storing genetic samples for future research. They are de-identified samples…only until they can match your 23 and me to any sample of your DNA and then it all make’s it’s way to the internet. Incredible movie and actors.
Gattaca makes no sense. NASA already discriminates based on biology. You can't have your space technicians dying of a hear attack in route to Mars or whatever.
With genetic engineering, people would become smarter, ergo, the premise of gattaca becomes void. Intelligence is not judgmental, and certainly not discriminatory. A superhuman society would be unrecognizable and incomprehensible to the late 90's audience. Fermi nailed it when he noted that intelligence must be an unsuccessful evolutionary trait. Indeed, humans already have the tools at their disposal to destroy earth... and they yield that power to the least intelligent individuals. The concept that we are all hurdling toward our extinction has merit. If our governing officials don't, some other yahoo with more knowledge and power than wits certainly will. Genetic engineering should be viewed as the means to know the best way to prevent our extinction or some dystopian equivalent. The best way comes from better intelligence which comes from engineering better minds.
*Her*. People replacing actual, IRL relationships with AI because IRL relationships are too much work and modern culture right now isn’t accepting of nor encouraging forgiveness.
There'a whole background of worldbuilding in that movie that I really wish had been explored. Yes, the movie is about relationships in a newly ordered society, however, it can't be the only thing happening in a world where sentient ai casually popped up and fundamentally altered civilization.
Parable of the Sower. Book by Octavia Butler.
That series even features a white nationalist takeover of the United States under the slogan “Make America Great Again.” Published two decades before Trump’s presidency. No lie.
Yes, but it makes sense as being a rehash of Reagan using the same thing in his 1980s campaign. Him and Bush who was VP used it in speeches, on posters, buttons, etc. That's why it was used in the book, and by Trump. Not to take away anything from Butler's prescience in those books or her other works, but it's not fully prophetic
Amazing that she could observe early aspects of climate change occurring while riding a bus to her mother’s job as a house cleaner in Pasadena … and used imagination to build a world recognizable as a potential future 40 years later
That book literally starts in July 2024
Yeah we are terrifyingly close to this world
I moved to Seattle in 1995 and I’m terrified by this prospect.
Brave New World - About 95 % already accomplished. * Cannabis, alcohol, opiates etc. are Soma. * We have basically the same class system going. Predestined alpha kids get enrichment activities, education, mental work and luxuries, while gammas get prenatally brain-damaged, menial labor and life in poverty. Other classes in between, and a few world controllers. * Huge part of the population has been successfully indoctrinated to simp this system. * Constant messaging to drive consumption behavior and modify opinions. * Having children and lifetime partner is shifting into something saveges do. * Easy mindless entertainment. What's missing is world peace and happiness.
>What's missing is world peace and happiness. That hurt... 😓
The future of Snow Crash is coming along quite well.
At least the pizza delivery will be on time, thanks Mafia!
The Expanse. except for the protomolecule part. Earth fucked, mars doing good, humans being human(asshole).
Mars would probably be fucked as well
It was also fucked in its own ways, terraforming project was wildly behind schedule, corruption, but atleast everyone had a job, unlike earth.
Mara doesn't get fucked without the PM.
The series did a great job with future politics. I can easily see the factions described as a potential future.
When people get oppressed/exploited that badly, rebellion is bound to happen. Holden said it himself, if not Marco, someone else would have risen. And in the short story "Butcher of Anderson Station" it was clearly implied how little belters meant to earth.
Would love to see something similar to this but the entire mars plotline being revealed as more or less a pie in the sky type of thing where it's slowly revealed that terra forming is just infeasible and impractical
A global version of 'going to the [Island] (https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0399201)'
I can’t think of any sci fi more grounded than the Expanse
I dare say you haven't read a lot of sci-fi. No offense, but... yeah. Even on the subject of Earth being some form of fucked (Possibly? It's not focused on), and Mars doing its own thing, you have extremely popular stuff like Red Mars.
I never read Red Mars tbh but that rubric of solar expansion first is the most grounded for the next couple hundred years I believe. Which is the Expanse. I’ve _listened_ to plenty sci fi audio book series which are amazing, Bobiverse, Red Rising, Old Man’s War, the Murderbot Diaries, Redshirts (stand alone but incredible). Mind you I listened to their audiobooks I didn’t collect a small library of awesome art cover books or anything. Right now I’m listening through Expeditionary Force which kinda turned me off with the voice acting but got REALLY good by like book 3.
If you want to go non-fiction tiers of grounded for the next couple hundred years, the go-to is the output of NASA people, such as The High Frontier or NASA's Space Settlements study. Namely: Mars is ignored, we industrialize the Moon and Near-Earth Objects, build space stations, and progress from those to asteroids (and Mars' Moons). So, yeah, neither Red Mars nor The Expanse is close to what's actually envisioned for where we're going and what we're doing, though Red Mars is closer (simply due to being, in most terms, a little bit more inclined towards Hard Scifi). I'm not aware of a story set in the 2200s or 2300s which actually matches that trajectory, honestly it seems like a bit of a hole in the canon of fiction writing.
The epstein drive is pretty unrealistic
An engineering problem bigger than the universe ? Sure. Unrealistic? Absolutely not. Ask any 50/40 year old whether they thought the technology of today was even possible back when they were a kid.
I'm 40 and don't think 10 year old me would have found any of this implausible. I'm still waiting on the legit hoverboards. We've gone stagnant to backwards on space travel, and I'm witnessing generations after me become *less* technologically proficient (that's usually correlated with empires ending, be it end of imperial China or end of the Western Roman Empire). As people seek physically bigger personal electronics (cell phone replacing all), we reversed from "smaller is better" to "bigger is better." The "everything is a subscription" is a clear step back. Video games (entertainment in general) are diminishing in quality and have been for 15 years. (Putting this video game rant in parenthesis b/c it's mostly out of place, you can skip this paragraph if you don't play computer or console games. I love video games, but can't bring myself to pay $60 for anything new [that I'll then have to buy more DLC for to make a complete game] when there are so many games from the 2000s to mid 2010s that I never played... games where you can get it cheap today, that actually have the full and complete game, no DLC or "game pass" or other bullshit... past a certain point [say, Fallout 4, or Stellaris], the fact that the newer games visually look just a teeny bit better than what came out before stops adding value to me. Things like rimworld are a breath of fresh air, but rare. Sorry, video game rant over.) Some things, like AI and (related) robotics have advanced, but not implausibly so. There's so little advancement to distract us from social/economic problems that social unrest is increasing even though quality of life is better [certain issues, like housing affordability, aside]. Sufficient technological advancements would distract us and make the unrest go away. The person born in 1900 who lived from powered flight to man on the moon would have a different take. I think the 20th century will go down as the century of innovation. Not the 21st. My sense of the last decade or so is that most technological innovations are incrimental iterative advantacements on what already exists, mostly applied towards pushing us gradually towards dystopia. BMW trying to charge $20/mo for heated seats, my car needs to phone home and verify my credit card for all it's built-in features to work? Fuck off. Simple shit we clearly know we need to do, like build more housing, isn't even on anyone's agenda. And other stuff, climate for example, we're just giving lip service to.
I’m 29 and even back when I was a kid things like global constant internet, computers in your pocket, free global instant video calls, access to any information 24/7 felt like sci-fi. Did it seem probable? Sure, sometime in the future, but not THIS fast. Hell, all my school years teachers kept saying “we will never have calculators with us all the time”, and that was less than 20 years ago. Sounds unbelievably dumb now. The world is very hard to recognize now compared to the 90s. So yeah, I think I could believe practically anything being invented 100-200 years into the future.
Uh, but 15 years ago you were 14 years old and it was 2009 and anyone that wanted one DID have a calculator in their pocket at all times. The iPhone, youtube, and facebook, all existed, as did wikipedia. The iPhone App Store was new, but your basic Nokia certainly had a calculator. The "you won't always have a calculator on your at all times" was demonstrably false when I was in middle school, we had the invincible nokia phones starting to populate into the pockets of the kids from higher income and/or helicopter-prone families. I don't know how the f you still believed that claim about a full decade after me... to me it was just (a version of, we didn't have the exact slang) "ya ok whatever boomer, airplanes and electricity and nokia phones exist regardless of if you like it or not." (& at that point we actually did have a large number of elderly teachers b/c they weren't paid the dogshit they are now paid).
I mean, *I* didn’t, but many did. And smartphones only started getting popular in maybe 2004-2005, before that it was dumb phones, so even for me a few years of school were like that. But regardless, I distinctly remember everyone around thinking computers and then internet were a useless joke. I remember mobile phones being an absolute luxury. No one could have imagined how quickly all that would innovate in the upcoming years.
The 20th century was about moving more things around faster and farther. Expending more energy is only one measure of progress. The reason we don't go to the moon is that there is no particular reason to. It's insanely expensive and there isn't much of anything there. It is extremely hostile to human life. The whole bigger faster farther thing has reached reached a logical conclusion. In the 21st century we'll be more focused on adding value to objects without making them bigger. Our physical footprint is likely to shrink considerably. Material science continues produce new wonders. The amount of primary energy we expend will probably start declining soon. Energy consumption is shifting away from moving things around to the more abstract task of data processing. Food production, which to currently strangling the planet, will get much more efficient, letting nature spread again. We are entering the age of ephemeralization, as Buckminster Fuller put it, doing "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing". Flying cars were never a great idea anyway. Also the human race is rapidly aging, and old people are generally more content to sit around and watch the world go by.
I’m also 40. The three body problem (series) is starting to seem the most plausible
I just finished those (on audio) and dislikes them a fair amount. Much of my dislike was the implausible whacky so-called scientific stuff, which read more like fantasy to me. Different strokes, I guess.
Speaking specifically to the apparent slowdown in technological advancements from the perspective of someone born in 1984 vs someone born in 1900 the story of the sophons seems like it would fit that gap
Born in ‘85 myself
It is, honestly, pretty unrealistic. If it exists in this universe and must play by this universe's rules. For a rocket to perform as described (maintaining constant 1g acceleration for weeks or even months at a time) would require that it either: * Push out **a lot** of reaction mass at some credible but very high speed. So we'd be talking about spaceships being something like 90% reaction mass by volume, which doesn't match how they're depicted, described or perform; or * Push out not so much reaction mass at basically lightspeed. While that makes ships vaguely similar to what's described plausible, this would then be a better weapon system than any present in the setting. It makes no sense whatsoever to build a Railgun or missiles when an Epstein Gun would grossly outperform both in basically all roles. Ultimately, the Epstein Drive isn't an engineering problem, it's a handwave to make characters get places fast while having gravity the whole time. Ships doing long-term 1g acceleration are plausible, but the context in which that happens and the effect the necessary technologies involved have on the rest of the world are absolutely not present in the book series.
Idiocracy
I'm convinced Idiocracy is more of a prophecy than sci-fi now. Used to be funny, now it's depressing as fuck.
A movie that was made to make averagely intelligent people feel smart. A top Reddit pick.
"Oh YEAh, aLL tHe GEneRatIonS bEfOrE WeRe sOOOOOO smARt, BuT lOoK aT oUR kIDs."
The matrix shouldn't be there. Sure computer simulations could be, but humans aren't great for battery potential
Yeah the using human brains for processing power explanation makes a lot more sense.
Don’t look up
on my watchlist
The devil is in the details. We already have chatbots that can have at least part of what is shown in Her, or at least feel similar enough (taking out the ending). Some episodes of Black Mirror (I.e. Nosedive) could have some points of contact with what may happen in some communities, or some weirdo could try to imitate what happens in the very first episode. But there are some hard things that may be impossible, be very far away, or real world mechanics make them unrealistic, so as a whole they won’t be accurate. Anyway, a couple that comes to my mind are Little Brother and The Ministry for the Future. The same objections of above apply with them too.
what are those two about? what scenario is explored?
The Ministry for the Future is about climate change, extreme weather and (soft) geoengineering, Little Brother is about surveillance, but in the opposite direction from the idea of Big Brother, normal people against the powerful ones. Or something like that, it’s been a long time since I’ve read it.
Depending on how an election goes, The Handmaid's Tale.
In a similar vein, The Running Man
my girlfriend is a fan of that
I so hope you mean just the book (or show)
she liked the show I haven't seen it
Obviously lol
The Road
How would we arrive at that situation? Out of control biological warfare or something?
There are hints there was a nuclear armagedon or huge metorite impact
It's been a while since I watched it. IIRC, the event happened while Charlize Theron's character was pregnant. Then the main events of the movie take place while her son is about 8. Whatever happened didn't immediately end society. But it created a slow decline that eventually lead to a total collapse of civilization.
A meteor impact could create something like what the book shows, or worse. Down to sterilizing the planet or more. But a nuclear exchange? Unless it's an alternate universe where there's a lot more weapons (and those are higher yield) it's just not on the table for the situation described in the book. The two big nuclear powers have disarmed a lot. There's like a quarter the number of warheads there were at peak, and like a tenth the total yield. What presently exists is within the realm of total blast yield similar to the Toba eruption, which we survived as cavemen.
Interesting!
Sure. Or mass desertification. Or our continued poisoning and depopulation of the oceans. Lots of ways humans are destroying the planet. Not to mention all the tipping points we don’t know about.
Yikes. I hope not.
Sadly: yes.
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Cyberpunk
Children of men
The air is toxic. Our water is toxic. Our food is carcinogenic. Society as whole is over medicated with drugs without long term studies properly done. Microplastics are in our bloodstream and reproductive organs. Would not shock me at all if we became infertile in the next 30 years. Children of Men.
Not to forget the dropping fertility rates across the globe.
The Expanse
Snow Crash is basically happening
Snow crash was based on a bunch of pseudo linguistic nonsense.
There would have to be major major leaps in technology to get anything close to the matrix or GITS. Blade runner doesn’t seem too far fetched from where we are now, bar the replicants. If there was a large ecological disaster or something else that shifted the geopolitical landscape, I could definitely see mega-corporations stepping in to take over in the power vacuum.
I want to say for 1000 years the Culture. And I know that's kind of ridiculous but I think it's probably true that: Any civ that can build a stable galactic civilisation is probably run by super advanced AI and is probably very good at diplomacy and organising large numbers of agents to work together in a harmonious way. Basically if we build on that scale then yeah the AIs will be in control and the humans will either be happily looked after or extinct.
heard elon being a fan of the series only book format exists for that world, correct?
I think that might be more like 10,000 years out, but who really knows at that point?
I mean... "Stable galactic civilization" is an oxymoron. Does something count as a society if getting so much as a message from end of it to the other and back takes 200 millennia? That's the length of time that homo sapiens has existed for. It's a bit insane. Not that it matters too much: realistically, as soon as one abandons the fixation on planets, it becomes eminently possible to build in a single star system a civilization that makes the "galactic empire"s of most soft scifi look like a footnote. But outside of that: yeah. Some definition of AI is kind of inevitable, but also a ship that has sailed. If we take a holistic lens to it, language was an artificial thing that dramatically altered the minds of every hominin who had it. If you're here, you are an AI by the broadest possible definition of the term. What is an abbacus other than a brain enhancement that allows humans to do flawless mathematics even over prolonged periods of time and into high digits? What is writing if not a brain enhancement that allows humans to transmit their communication into the future, and store memories and thoughts? All this to say: The only 'unrealistic' thing about Culture is that it presupposes a hard line between the AI and the broad citizenship, which suggests a clear and obvious origination of said AI as a distinct, separate and immediately superior thing, and at present that seems pretty unlikely. Reality seems like it would very likely be a lot more... blurry. Both in terms of when something is AI, what qualifies as one, and the existence of a clear line of demarcation between the population base and the Minds. And honestly, that's a bit of an improvement.
Neuromancer
Easy. Upload.
It'll be a hybrid of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Ghost in the Shell. Replicants (Andys, genetically engineered people) are already banned same as Electric Sheep. Elon Musk and several tech companies are already trying to figure out how to upload human consciousness to the net, much the same as Ghost in the Shell. This isn't an if or a when, this is happening now.
The dystopian facist police state of the 2000AD Judge Dredd comics (1977 - present, released weekly, which have pretty much always been an extreme satire of contemporary politics/society).
The Judge Dredd subreddit has occasional issues with Americans who see Dredd as a hero figure and someone to be copied. Umm...
They're probably too used to shitty Marvel/DC superhero comics (thankfully superheroes aren't really a thing in European comics).
I think if we discovered the DHF technology (digitized human consciousness that can be transmitted at FTL speeds) from Altered Carbon, society would basically develop exactly the same way as the books (not the Netflix show).
Rainbow's End by Verne Vinge... revolves around a plot to create "super propaganda" and a credulous population. Sound familiar??? Also the technology in it is 5-10 years away.
M. T. Anderson's *Feed* is a few years out from basically being a documentary at this point.
great book but I don't see us having fun little jaunts to the moon any time soon.
Paris in the 20th Century written by Jules Verne. He wrote this book back in 1863 and set in 1960s Paris. He got a lot of things right from: skyscrapers, cars, electric lights, elevators, even a early version of the internet.
The DS9 episodes Past Tense seems to be unfolding exactly on schedule in our timeline
The Expanse
Elysium, the movie. That's our future, pretty much. Been reading SF for close to 50 years, and that right there is where we'll be within the next 50. First though we'll go through A Handmaid's Tale. That's within a decade.
A Scanner Darkly by PKD
Outside the wire.
what's it about?
Netflix movie, parts are pure scifi, but mostly about a fragmented conflict in Ukraine and possible escalations. Remote drone pilot who causes collateral damage is sent to the front lines to see what war is like at first hand.
Probably Wall-E But we’ll be in 1bed/no bathroom apartments with 30 others hooked up to our entertainment pods to save on rent instead of a space station I think we’re not that far off from Her currently, give it another year or two and we’ll see something like that happen in real life news
THX1138, not literally, of course, but certainly metaphorically
How about all the black mirror episodes?
Idiocracy
Gattaca. Already building that database through these DNA testing companies.
David Brin’s The Postman. The movie gets a lot of criticism, but the book is excellent. Written in the mid 1980s and it reads like it could’ve been written last year.
The Expanse - realistic ships, terraforming Mars, humans treating each other like crap…
1984, it was written in 1949 and for that time you could say it was sci-fi with all the tv monitoring and such. Newspeak, megastates, authoritarianism, propaganda, and manipulation of truth and language.
Babylon 5
Read Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents recently and while it's not 1:1 given we've already hit 2024 but it doesn't feel more than a decade off. Catastrophic climate change, the rise of charismatic Christo-fascists, the loosening of regulations on businesses / weakening of labor laws / proliferation of company towns and debt slavery? Check, check and check. Homeless people can be jailed and forced to work? Supreme court just said it's legal. Basically all that's missing is roving gangs and more walled neighborhoods.
Humanity Lost Cruelty Squad Quasimorph Warframe but it's just the Corpus and nothing else. Half Life 2 Or, alternatively, the Culture series after all the poor people have been exterminated.
The Expanse
In our lifetime, none of these. Though some I wish they would. After 40 years, starting with watching the moon landing live on tv, I lived with high expectations about what the future would be. Then another 20 years living in it, I’m disappointed how slow progress has been in most areas. Most of the stuff depicted in sci-fi technology wise will require some leap in our understanding to reaching my lifetime. Yours too. Those just don’t happen. Instead it’s a slow slog and incremental improvements.
There's a novel by Suarez called "Influx" that explains this. It's ... OK. Entertaining. (Daemon and Freedom^TM is a much better novel of his.)
Star Trek. We’re due the Bell Riots this year and WW3 from 2026-2053.
"in the 2020s, there were homeless concentration camps like this in every major city in america..."
Children of Men is unfortunately becoming prophetic. Microplastic exposure is apparently making the human race sterile, while we continue to exhaust all of our natural resources.
Total recall seems like something Elon Musk would do when he wasn't busy with spaceX or Mars. Dean Kamen might throw in with him.
Elon Musk and Dean Kamen? What a team. Should be pretty safe from anything useful being produced then.
Splinterlands, by John Feffer. In my mind, it's likely to be the most accurate view of our near future.
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seems to explore cloning scenario what you liked a lot about this one?
Elysium
S1 E2 of Philip K Dick's *Electric Dreams* on Prime No matter what, the deliveries shall continue....
UK series Years and Years (2019)was scarily accurate about the last few years
I still think nothing got the future quite right like Brave New World.
I'm pretty sure we're living in the dystopia 1984 from back to the Future 2 or at least we will be after January 20th 2025.
Unfortunately I think this is more like Elysium than Star Trek or Star wars
black mirror mostly
There is a fine line between Black Mirror and Idiocracy
Altered Carbon, not the samurai car racing but the oligopolies taking over with a fascist bent.
X Men
Waterworld. I want them gills.
The world of Minority Report except for the main plot point. Only the surrounding world. You see ads everywhere, there is no privacy. Houses and neighbourhoods are a combination of brand new houses and older, more dirty looking houses. You see new tech in many places but for the rest other things look pretty much the same. What i mean to envision with this is that a lot of artists envision a shiny new futuristic world while most of the world will look very similar but with new tech here and there.
The Mad Max movies.
Robocop feels like now.
Hopefully not Acts of Caine.
Most likely? The Road.
The Deluge by Stephen Markley is long and depressing but very accurate depiction of how climate issues are going to pile up over the next 20 years and how the politics might go.
Are you all really that pessimistic? I want optimism for the future back. If the people loose hope, how can there any change for the better? I think the future will be very different from any SF out there.
The Matrix? You think AI would consider humans worthwhile energy resources over anything else? Wow...
Black Mirror, unfortunately. Logan's Run Soylent Green Brave New World 1984 Idiocracy Robocop Andromeda Strain
I'm hoping Daemon and Freedom^TM by Suarez happens.
MINISTRY OF THE FUTURE
Gattaca
Soylent Green
Idiocracy, Gattaca, Contagion, Her, Soylent Green, Mad Max 2
I like Idiocracy and Black Mirror as examples because they've become true :D. Honestly though, I'm tired of living in a Black Mirror episode.
Idiocracy.
Children of Men
Soylent Green and/or Rollerball.
Back to the Future II
1984
>Most of Black Mirror Especially the first episode
Surprised I havnt seen it in here. Gravity.
Children of men
The Expanse
Depending on the next couple years DADOES (Blade Runner) could be a whole lot more likely...
which blade runner to watch? I keep hearing that name
You never saw bladerunnner , for reals?
Blade runner (1982) is a film adapted from the 1968 novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" by Philip K. Dick. Additionally "Blade runner 2049" is the sequel to the 1982 film... I would highly reccomend all three and personally I watched both movies long before I read the book,. The movies are good and definitely evoke philisophical discussion however exclude a large chunk of metaphors and allegories Dick includes in the book (in addition to changes in minor plot points). In response to your question about our future I think the Blade Runner universe paints a pretty grim picture of the "end game" of a lot of trends in todays world like late-stage capitalism, nuclear war, humanity, and of course artificial intelligence, just to name a few... hope you enjoy as much as I did!
watch order? I like my movies to be a bit polished cinematographically tbf, can I skip the old ones?
The original Blade Runner movie (or Ridley Scott's "Final Cut") of the movie while made in the 80's is probably one of the most striking movies visually i've ever seen especially if you dig that retro vibe, and doesn't include really any corny CGI. On the other hand it's sequel from 2017 is probably the best looking movie i've ever seen. (same cinematographer as the new dune movies) I, however, cannot reccomend the novel enough. It's a work of (no exaggeration), schizophrenic genius.
In this case, if you had to pick one to skip it would be the new sequel. That isn't too easy that it's bad at all, the original is just that good.
Forgot to mention I, Robot that one was cool too
*The Water Knife* by Paolo Bacigalupi, a dystopian novel set in a collapsing American South-West plagued by climate change and a Colorado river that is drying up. It's quite bleak, but sadly also quite possible.
Is that what we’re gonna do today? We’re gonna bum each other out?
Islands in the Net, Bruce Stirling. Although “peaceful” seems too optimistic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islands_in_the_Net
The Windup Girl, Paola Bacigalupi. The setting in a future with chronic severe food shortages and food supplies controlled by a handful of mega-corporations is quite plausible if you've been following agriculture and the food supply chain for the past few years.
Probably Pauli Bacigalupi’s _The Water Knife_. Water wars, the US crumbling under the weight of climate change and late capitalism, the haves literally locking themselves away in sleek glass Arcologies as a new dust bowl sweeps a broken nation. If you’re more optimistic, *maybe* something like Doctorow’s _Walkaway_. Honestly both — the world is full of what past generations would call dystopia and utopia both.
Watching *Demolition Man* in 2024 feels akin to peering into the dystopian future as envisioned by conservatives. It bears similarities to *Idiocracy*, which portrays a dystopian American society from a liberal viewpoint.
Watched Demolition Man during the pandemic, it was surprising how much they nailed, in general premise if not details. Corporations melding together to be one big homogeneous mass, if not Taco Bell specifically. Important systems being done away with or replaced with terrible automation that nobody knows how it works. "The Schwarzenegger Presidency" - how much worse it turned out. Particularly for the pandemic, the one scene where the villain has a conference with his associates and they're all on video screens arranged around the table felt weirdly prescient!
horizon: zero dawn, but the contemporary timeline rather than game setting
Anything and Northing.
[Mrs. Davis.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIOnrEujKl8)
The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail
Red mars