Lots of good suggestions so far, Brave New World and Don’t Look Up would be right up there for me. But my #1 is this…
The Machine Stops (PDF) Written in 1909 so out of copyright, this book is so ahead of its time it makes remarkable reading today. The amount of things predicted that describe the modern day is incredible. It’s also not that long, so well worth a read.
100% no doubt The parable of the sower and subsequent book. I read that book - started reading it - in June this year and read it over about a month. It was very creepy to be reading a sci fy book set in the future that is now my present and while it is not as bad right now as Octavia Butler makes it out to be, we are definitely heading there if drastic action is not taken immediately.
Edit: the books in order: (Only two, sadly she died while writing the third but still both worth reading, there isn’t a clif hanger at the end) https://www.octaviabutler.com/parableseries
Absolutely this! Octavia Butler literally wrote a fascist American president with the slogan “Make America Great Again” in 1993.
Horizon Zero Dawn: Total extinction by the 2060s because some mad, narcissistic Elon Musk guy overestimates himself and fucks it up for the whole world? Doesn’t sound too far-fetched to me right now.
Parable of the Sower
It was written as near future fiction anyway. In fact the dates mentioned in the book start out in our past. Just the catalyst events haven’t quite happened yet. Add a few years to the dates and I could see us heading towards that kind of societal break down.
This book is haunting. It made me seriously consider buying a gun. If I could convince my wife to read it, we’d probably have an armory by now.
1984
As an American I’d absolutely say Idiocracy, but that’s just my little corner of humanity.
Wall-E by way of 1984.
I’m going to go obscure here and say that the world of 2077 from the television show Continuum
It ran for a few seasons; I enjoyed it for the most part. Not the best, not the worst. But definitely in terms of the premise where Corporations have essentially bought out failing governments, leading to an advanced surveillance state, and anti-corporate terrorists, etc… etc…
Lots of good responses in this thread so far, but I keep thinking of the newest Gibson trilogy with regards to “the jackpot” where the majority of the population dies from a series of “not quite the big one” pandemics and climate issues and society is taken over by the kleptocracy. I love Gibson’s books, but I wish he would stop accurately predicting our demise.
I’ve gotta go with Mad Max here. Between the words oil obsession, rising aggression and dumbing down of society I can’t see it going any other way.
Can we choose? I’ll pick the Matrix. Yes we are slaves to the machines, but at least they give us happy dreams
Blade Runner
As bland and forgettable as it was, the film adaptation of “Tomorrowland.”
The premise (or at least my takeaway) basically being that, we might have been headed toward a techno-utopia of optimistic and bright developments, but greed and cynicism took over the spirit of invention, and everyone collectively became cynical and pessimistic about the future as a result.
Technology and those who claimed to wield it became enemies of the people.
Many of our most popular “near future” stories and entertainment are about societal collapse, disaster, the worst of humanity turning on themselves, and technology being used for its worst purposes. We almost enjoy morbidly indulging in forecasting our own bad ending, over and over and over. Warnings became franchises co-opted by the bad powers they warned against.
Partially, we’ll get a crappy future because we’ve all been conditioned and used to the idea that it’s inevitable and there’s nothing we can do about it. This reduces our will to fight it, and instead we settle for merely enduring it.
If we had hope and fire and a taste of something better, we’d stop giving in to doomerism and just accepting it when it keeps getting worse.
This is why I really like the emergence of Solar Punk. It’s a hopeful and bright rebellion against endless neon acid rain tumbling down towering corporate fortresses, rusting everybody’s work-leased cyber-limbs as they gig-work 24/7 to afford neural software updates.
Instead, it’s about embracing communitarianism, careful stewardship of natural resources, sustainable existence in tandem with nature instead of against it, open and free knowledge to all, endless invention with human thriving in mind.
If people actually believed, not merely that’s how it should be, but that it could be …we could make some real progress.
deleted by creator
I don’t know about closest, but definitely most likely, Tank Girl. Basically, water and power will be extreme scarcities for the majority and a corporation that bottles up the water to keep it from becoming free through rain and owns all of central power grid will be the effective government. It will take a few more decades for the water to get bottled up by Nestlé, et al., and the water infrastructure to fail in more cities. And then the fossil fuel industry to run out of resources and collapse and thus leave only the few nuclear reactors as the only major power sources, without renewables investment, which can be grabbed by the water owners by saying they need the power to collect the water bottles and they need to “secure” the dangerous reactors with the military hardware they collected to protect “their” water sources from protesters and poor people over the years.
