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!
An Empire Wilderness by Robert D. Kaplan. A nonfiction travelogue about trends in North American society, published in 1998 but feels like it could’ve been written yesterday. Here’s some quotes:
“The same spirit of individualism that helped build the nation may henceforth deconstruct it, as new worldwide settlement patterns link similar communities by new computerized technologies and air travel while traditional states defined by geography wither […] in a computer-driven, knowledge-based world economy, educated Americans may have more in common with (and, ultimately, more loyalty to) their highly educated friends and counterparts in Europe, Latin America, and Asia than they do with less educated fellow Americans a few miles away.”
“[…] there are two Americas: the people who own stocks and mutual funds and have seen their assets rise dramatically in the 1990’s and those who are completely dependent on wages, which have risen far less if at all.”
“Today’s volunteer army is different from all others in America’s history. Soldiers are becoming like doctors and lawyers: a professional group we would like to need less but upon which we rely more.”
(about St. Louis): “Suburbanization here does not mean decentralization as much as it does jurisdictional sovereignty for well-off whites so they can isolate themselves from the problems of predominantly black inner cities.”
“Our culture is getting real thin.”