Been reading Corey Doctorow lately and catch myself thinking, “Aw c’mon! That’s not how it works!” And then remember, he’s writing about the near future.
Radicalized was pretty damn close to the mark. Sure in this case Luigi was radicalized from back pain and not cancer.
A combination of all the worst bits of the worst ones
Penultimate Truth. Predicted containing the cattle using fear of something that doesn’t even exist in reality.
deleted by creator
Wall-E by way of 1984.
Can we choose? I’ll pick the Matrix. Yes we are slaves to the machines, but at least they give us happy dreams
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.
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.
Blade Runner
I do believe that a lot of aspects of The Ministry for the Future by K.S. Robinson have chances of becoming true.
The deadly heatwave in south Asia, governments going rogue and playing with geo engineering on their own, climate refugee camps and the general sense of too little too late.
But the book is fairly optimistic, so hopefully, people of the world getting together and accepting a new paradigm will come to be true.
Idiocracy/Dont look up/1984/Judge Dredd
My bets on Robocop style corporate dictatorship until terminator style annihilation occurs.
Star Trek was never on the cards.
Actually, star trek might be. In their lore, things got a lot worse before they got better.
World War 3 began in 2026 according to TNG, we’re close!
In the aftermath, the world became an irradiated apocalyptic hellhole for almost a century, most cities destroyed and governments collapsed. I’d say we’re well on our way to that state, question is whether or not we emerge better on the other side. I’d almost be okay with that if there was some assurance that humanity would come out as Star Trek afterwards.
Bell Riots never happened, that timeline is broken.
I think that it’d have to be one of those countless near-future works that are set in what basically amounts to being the present-day world.
I think that if you’re looking for something other than that, something more in a far-out setting, you’d need to ask something like “what futuristic work do you think society will most resemble in 200 years” or something like that. That forces things down the road a bit, and makes one pick among different predictions about how society will change in the future.
You better start believing in cyberpunk dystopia, Miss Turner. You’re in one!
Not sure which one. But we already pretty much check all the boxes of cyberpunk.
I think we’re in the boring version of Shadowrun’s cyberpunk universe. Take out the magic, take out the idea that people perform runs doing vigilante tasks and take out the goblinifcation (so no orks/trolls) and no other races. But the idea of megacorps getting bigger and bigger while everything decays around us with escalating costs, yeah that part is real.
Damnit, I managed to trip into a Shadowrun campaign and I didn’t even roll a Dwarf.
I always thought CEOs being greedy mythical dragons that compulsively hoard riches because it’s their nature, to be a brilliantly plausible fantasy element.
At this point it almost feels like a rational explanation for their inhuman behavior.
On this track that’s probably the only fantasy element we’d get LOL.
It’s the shittiest form of cyberpunk.
We have cybernetic implants! But they’re only for people who need them or are being headed up by a dipshit (Elon’s Neuralink)…
We have AI! But it’s just a glorified chat bot and it’s not even necessarily good at even that…
We keep having gnarly pandemics of new diseases.
The mega corporations are exactly what you expect.
The quality of life is exactly as you expect, except even the best possible quality you could get if you were rich also kinda fucking sucks compared to fiction (can’t even live on Mars forever in a Matrix connected blow job machine IRL)…
The dystopia would be more bearable if I could become a cybernetic superman on Mars. Just sayin’.
You expected to be the main character, but you’ve just realized you’re just one of many NPCs in a cyberpunk reality, just trying yo get by, but getting screwed at every turn by corporations, governments and fate.
Well said! I’m looking forward to the solarpunk/biopunk future nowadays because of… all that
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.
If we don’t dodge that bullet, Years and Years. Or Neuromancer.
Neuromancer would be an improvement at this point. Gibson underestimated just how bad corporations could get.
