V for Vendetta
I like your optimism
L for Luigi?
Penultimate Truth. Predicted containing the cattle using fear of something that doesn’t even exist in reality.
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.
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’.
Well said! I’m looking forward to the solarpunk/biopunk future nowadays because of… all that
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.
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.
Lots of good responses in this thread so far, but I keep thinking of the newest Gibson trilogy with regards to “the jackpot” where the majority of the population dies from a series of “not quite the big one” pandemics and climate issues and society is taken over by the kleptocracy. I love Gibson’s books, but I wish he would stop accurately predicting our demise.
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.
Lots of good suggestions so far, Brave New World and Don’t Look Up would be right up there for me. But my #1 is this…
The Machine Stops (PDF) Written in 1909 so out of copyright, this book is so ahead of its time it makes remarkable reading today. The amount of things predicted that describe the modern day is incredible. It’s also not that long, so well worth a read.
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.
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.
"Lack of respect, wrong attitude, failure to obey authority. The Farm, immediately. - death sentence in Ellison’s book ‘A Boy and His Dog’
Awesome book. The whole series was good, except the last one.
People are talking about really wonderful interesting things, but I can’t even choose between those I’m thinking about.
Star Wars EU - because that’s what I see around. Lots of stupidity, evil and decay, but in the end there’s the sky and the life with all its beauty. The old part of it, which mostly was happening after Empire’s institution while the rebels were not something close to victory in anyone’s opinion.
Vacuum Flowers - that’s the “worse is better” evolutionary optimism. That it will all become only worse, there’s no good defeating evil, we will all die, but - life finds a way, humanity finds a way, and so on. It will go on.
Heinlein’s Door into Summer - some parts are too much like our reality.
Actually I think all 3 have the same general idea, I just can’t quite catch it.
Funny, I’d have said we’re closer to the new Star Wars cinematic trilogy than the EU.
You think you’ve won, then a few years later, oh look, fascism is back and it’s killing people in job lots again.
100% no doubt The parable of the sower and subsequent book. I read that book - started reading it - in June this year and read it over about a month. It was very creepy to be reading a sci fy book set in the future that is now my present and while it is not as bad right now as Octavia Butler makes it out to be, we are definitely heading there if drastic action is not taken immediately.
I’ve gotta go with Mad Max here. Between the words oil obsession, rising aggression and dumbing down of society I can’t see it going any other way.
I’m going to go obscure here and say that the world of 2077 from the television show Continuum
It ran for a few seasons; I enjoyed it for the most part. Not the best, not the worst. But definitely in terms of the premise where Corporations have essentially bought out failing governments, leading to an advanced surveillance state, and anti-corporate terrorists, etc… etc…
Blade Runner
