I just finished “The Lathe of Heaven” by Ursula Leguin, and it was absolutely uncanny how it described the world today. What books have you read from more than 25 years ago that, when read today, seem to describe our world with unusual precision?
“The Lathe” was written in 1971 and nominally set in 1989. In the initial scene, she describes climate change:
The Greenhouse Effect had been quite gradual, and Haber, born in 1962, could clearly remember the blue skies of his childhood. Nowadays the eternal snows were gone from all the world’s mountains, even Everest, even Erebus, fiery-throated on the waste Antarctic shore.
And then she proceeds to discuss various permutations of war among Israel, the Middle East, China, and Afghanistan. I know these were all hotspots before, but I felt as though I was reading a novel with a contemporary setting!
Surprised I haven’t seen The Grapes of Wrath mentioned yet - the actual amounts that the labourers are being paid has changed a bit, but the attitudes of the landowners and the sheer, gut-gnawing desperation of the working class felt uncomfortably relevant when I read it.
I read it for the first time recently, and was stunned at how many events of the book I would be completely unsurprised to learn in a newspaper today.
One of the greatest books of all time, completely nails the fundamental ethos of America so perfectly that I think it’ll be relevant until the end of capitalism (if that ever comes)
Things are the same today as when The Grapes of Wrath was written because Steinbeck was a communist and therefore was able to accurately describe capitalism, which is still ruling the USA today.
Agreed