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!
I am just reading Fahrenheit 451 now and holy crap. It is terrifying. It’s not at all what I expected. I thought it’d be a parable, it’s a straight up horror story. The most prescient part to me is the guy’s marriage, his wife spends all day watching her screens and listening to entertaining blather, meaningless stories that make her feel like family, but she can’t really explain. He can’t talk to her much because it makes her shallow and childlike. But also she tries to kill herself. I’m only in, like, chapter 1. I can’t believe this was written in 1951.
Add The Murderer, which Bradbury published two years later to accurately predict the horror of our smartphone world.
Fun fact, the book is famous for its portrayal of government censorship and the dangers of that but Bradbury originally intended it to be more of a critique of television! He thought it would rot everyone’s brains.
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