Mass Surveillance, Transformation, and Making America Great Again: Novelists Who Anticipated Our Present | Science fiction books

THis year marks the 100th anniversary of the first demonstration of television in London. Elizabeth II sent the first royal email in 1976. The first meeting of the Lancashire Society of Changemakers was held in 1876. All were notable anniversaries. But I will choose 2026 as the 85th anniversary of a great short story: The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) by Jorge Luis Borges. It’s about chance, mazes and impossible storytelling. Cui Bin, one of the narrator’s ancestors, sets himself the task of writing a novel with thousands of actors: “A huge guessing game, or like, that’s all about time.” In most novels, when a character reaches a crossroads, he or she must choose: this path, or that path. However, in Cui Bin’s novel, all possible paths have been chosen. This creates “a growing and dizzying network of disparate, converging, and parallel temporalities.” The garden has endless branching paths.

Borges’s story is often said to foretell the many-worlds hypothesis in quantum physics — first proposed by Hugh Everett in 1957, then popularized by Bryce DeWitt in the 1970s as the “many-worlds interpretation” of quantum mechanics. In a 2005 article titled The Garden of Divergent Worlds, physicist Alberto Rojo investigated this claim. Did physicists read Borges? Or did Borges read the universe? It turns out that Bryce DeWitt was unaware of Borges’s garden. When Rojo questioned Borges, he also denied everything: “This is really strange, because the only thing I know about physics comes from my father, who one day showed me how a barometer works.” He added: “Physicists are very creative!”

As Rojo’s imaginary investigation demonstrates, imaginative forecasting is a strange art. We do not live in Borges’ garden, so it is impossible to go back in time, connect the universe and be sure what would have happened if Borges had never written about connecting the universe. Would Everett still propose a universe-linking theory? The universe is mysterious. So is the interaction between cause and effect. H.G. Wells’s 1914 futuristic novel The World Breaks Free depicts the devastating effects of combined “atomic bombs.” Physicist Leo Szilard read Wells’s novel in 1932 and conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933. We cannot enter a parallel universe in which Wells thrives as an apprentice in the clothing industry, stops writing and becomes the distinguished manager of Hyde’s drapery shop in Southsea. However, one line of influence is clear. When Szilard realized the importance of his theory, he was frightened: “To know what it might mean – and I knew it because I had read H.G. Wells.”

The future is uncharted territory, a place off the maps. This gives writers a certain imaginative freedom: to create dystopias, utopias, experiences, and imaginary societies. In Begum Rokeya’s Sultana’s Dream (1905) – which appeared a decade before Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland. – The traveler ventures into a high-tech, matriarchal society where hard work is done “by electricity,” food is easy to cook, and transportation options include a type of hydrogen helicopter. Marge Percy’s 1976 novel A Woman on the Edge of Time examines both utopian and dystopian futures: a peaceful rural community versus a hyper-capitalist city where the rich prolong their lives while the poor struggle to survive. What Percy’s novel suggests is that these futures slip into existence and disappear, in response to events in the present. Or perhaps it exists only in the hero’s mind. Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower and 1998 Parable of the Talents are set in post-apocalyptic California. Once again, the wealthy are shielding themselves against harsh reality, isolated in fortified communities. The climate is devastating. People miss the good old days. The infamous president swears that he will “Make America Great Again” – looking back to Reagan, and forward to MAGA. Butler describes her characters in a state of surreal detachment. The climate apocalypse sounds like “old hat science fiction.” This sense of reality as implausible, eerily similar to paranormal fiction, foreshadows our dystopian, cynical present.

Then there are the writers who predicted our surveillance society: Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (English translation published in 1924), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). These novels are so absurdly relevant to our age of surveillance capitalism that it seems our tech moguls are using them not as sarcastic warnings, but as motivational texts. In all three future societies, the ideological superstate prohibits any form of privacy. Isolation is distrustful because it encourages contemplation and the possibility of independence of thought. Even the privacy of the inner mind is violated – wherever possible. Behind these novels is Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, another story about the mass surveillance and control of women’s bodies by reactionary governments. Meanwhile, Atwood MaddAdam The trilogy (Oryx and Crake, 2003; The Year of the Flood, 2009; MaddAdam, 2013) poses ethical dilemmas related to bioengineering, pandemics, and monopolies.

In Neal Stevenson’s 1992 novel Snow Shattered, “Metaverse” is an immersive virtual reality that requires a headset. In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg renamed the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to Meta and announced his intention to develop a “Metaverse”. William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer imagined a real-life setting called The Matrix. This novel brought the term “cyberspace” into cyberspace (and beyond). In Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report (1956), pre-crime units use psychics to predict future crimes so that police can make preventive arrests. Dick wonders, what happens if a crime is predicted but the future criminal changes his mind? Are they still guilty? Fast forward to the present, and yes, pre-crime operations are being trialled across the UK. No need for intermediaries. Predictive law enforcement agencies use data mining, predictive algorithms, and facial recognition instead. What could go wrong?

Finally, there is Dick’s endlessly useful idea of ​​Cable, which he coined in his 1968 novel Do Robots Dream of Electric Sheep? For Dick, “Kipple are useless objects, like junk mail, match folders after the last match was used, or gum wrappers.” The first law of cable is that it “expels non-cable.” You can’t beat Cable, “except temporarily and perhaps in one place.” Kipple is now the garbage of the internet, our bloated inboxes, and artificial intelligence. Could Dick have predicted this? Can some visionary novelists really see the future?

Novels of the future, Atwood said, are actually profound examinations of the present. Hence, as Borges explains, it is a massive guessing game. Some guesses at the future are better than others. Some of them are strangely wonderful. Could Dick, in the 1960s, have envisioned a world in which human beings were inundated with the flotsam and wreckage of modern life—or was he really writing about the exhaustion of his present moment? Either way, his advice is still applicable, both wise and inspiring: Maybe all we can do is find a balance between Kibble pressures and non-Kibble pressures – useless waste and valuable things. When tech tycoons turn dystopia into utopia, maybe that’s as utopian as it is now. Cable fight!