Wall-E by way of 1984.
As an American I'd absolutely say Idiocracy, but that's just my little corner of humanity.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: the books in order: (Only two, sadly she died while writing the third but still both worth reading, there isn't a clif hanger at the end) https://www.octaviabutler.com/parableseries
Absolutely this! Octavia Butler literally wrote a fascist American president with the slogan "Make America Great Again" in 1993.
Idiocracy.
Birth rates are down everywhere and the majority of the people left making lots of babies are not the ones you wish would be having them. Being virtuous and on the "right side of history" means nothing if those values die with you and are not passed to the next generation.
the majority of the people left making lots of babies are not the ones you wish would be having them
Found the eugenicist
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.
100% its cyberpunk. corpo takeover with having to use technology to get by even when it is bad for you.
We don't even get cool neon signs, everything is sad beige now... :(
Makes me think of
honestly the neon all over like tokyo is one of the more unrelistic aspects to me. same with the private link. all the ads will be straight to the optic nerve and it will be so dreary when looking at it plainly.
Yeah, but where the hell are my leg implants that allow me to double jump and air dash already?
air dash is a skill. your just being lazy.
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.
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'.
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.
1984
WALL-E. We just don't have a way to escape yet, but the rest is happening regardless.
Idiocracy but mixed with the Neuromancer series and 1984.
Add a dash of « The Handmaid’s Tale »
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...
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.
V for Vendetta
I like your optimism
L for Luigi?
A combination of Snow Crash and Idiocracy
Ah I love Snow Crash.
We're already at the point of bizarre self-parody, cringe-irony, ultra-capitalism, but instead of pizza delivering street-samurai and a fascinating metaverse...
...we got grub/dash/food/rabbit/whatever and..."meta." Ugh.
I hate so much that Idiocracy was so on the mark. Knowledge being lost, culture being 100% based on consumption, corporate warmonger leadership. The entertainment is basically there if you look at YouTube's front page it's like:
"OW! MuH bAwLz! (For $48,000,000?!?!?!) - 2 hrs. ago | 3 million views"
"Slappin buttz n' moar munee - UpGrAyD (ft. GoonOhioSkebedeezyFR) - 1 day ago | 7.5 million views"
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.
Contagion and Children of Men - while they didn't look far into the future and dealt with existing problems, it's still horrifyingly accurate.
Jasper: "Pull my finger"
Her.
Given that we've already had a few suicides caused by (or at least exacerbated by) LLM chatbots, I think we're already there.
Dune.
Not the cool parts, the Butlerian Jihad.
I'd have gone with WH40Ks war with the men of iron but there's absolutely no chance we reach golden age of technology levels before we fuck ourselves.
Can we choose? I'll pick the Matrix. Yes we are slaves to the machines, but at least they give us happy dreams
Brave New World
We’re already living it
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 could see the Golgafrinchan telephone sanitizer situation coming to pass.
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