Trump, MAGA, moon landing…in fiction, the future was always fact
No matter what happens, almost everything has already been predicted and minutely described by some writer somewhere. Excerpts from This Week, Those Books on the writer as prophet and policy guru. Sign up at https://thisweekthosebooks.substack.com/ and get the post and readalong the day it drops
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The Big Story:
Writers imagined these fictional scenarios, decades, sometimes even centuries, before they became fact:
A 21st century Christian fundamentalist United States led by a president with the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’. [Parable of the Talents, published 1998]
Uncontrollable fires in Los Angeles in 2025 as the world battles climate change. [Parable of the Sower, published 1993]
…
Profound disconnection with society and nature as people communicate via an electronic screen, forerunner of the internet. [The Machine Stops, published 1909]
Unsurprisingly, the UK authorities today, like the US after the 9/11 attacks, are working with writers to imagine the future in order to prepare for it.
This week, we look at these stories:
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And here, free to access, is an earlier post on sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s influential novel The Ministry for the Future
COP28: Getting the climate party started
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The Back Story:
Allen Stroud, chair of the British Science Fiction Association, is part of the Creative Futures project. He says it puts “science fiction writers in conversation with the UK Ministry of Defence to identify the challenges we will face in the future.”
Last year, Nato published a graphic novel, Nato 20993 and Nato 2099 – The Science Fiction Anthology. Both imagined the military alliance’s future 150 years after the organisation was founded….
After 9/11, the US military reportedly asked Hollywood screenwriters to think of what the future might hold…
This Week’s Books:
Parable of the Sower
By: Octavia Butler
Publisher: Four Walls Eight Windows
Year: 1993
Parable of the Talents
By: Octavia Butler
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Year: 1998
Octavia Butler’s 1990s novels came five years apart and are so prophetic the writer might have been denounced as a witch in an earlier age.
The first book, set in Los Angeles in 2025, shows a world reeling from the effects of climate change and deadly fires. The second, set in the United States in 2032, shows a country run by Christian fundamentalists, while President Andrew Steele Jarret touts a MAGA slogan and an agenda to return America to glory…
Choice quotes:
“That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.”
– Parable of the Sower
…
The Machine Stops
By: E M Forster
Publisher: The Oxford and Cambridge Review
Year: 1909
This 1909 short story is set in a world where every human being lives solely within the confines of their “room”, communicating with others via a system that is like Zoom or Teams…
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Originally published at This Week, Those Books
