As an American I'd absolutely say Idiocracy, but that's just my little corner of humanity.
Wall-E by way of 1984.
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"
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.
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'.
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.
100% its cyberpunk. corpo takeover with having to use technology to get by even when it is bad for you.
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.
We don't even get cool neon signs, everything is sad beige now... :(
Makes me think of
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 but mixed with the Neuromancer series and 1984.
Add a dash of « The Handmaid’s Tale »
More of a glug.
WALL-E. We just don't have a way to escape yet, but the rest is happening regardless.
V for Vendetta
I like your optimism
L for Luigi?
A combination of Snow Crash and Idiocracy
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.
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.
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.
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.
I could see the Golgafrinchan telephone sanitizer situation coming to pass.
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.
The Water Knife by Paolo Baccigalupi is pretty on the nose for the near future of the southern US
1984
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.
Brave New World
We’re already living it
Been reading Corey Doctorow lately and catch myself thinking, "Aw c'mon! That's not how it works!" And then remember, he's writing about the near future.
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...
Our history sounds shockingly similar to Animal Farm.
Get invaded by the Saud dynasty, an ultraconservative, wahhabist group
Become an absolute monarch, where criticism = death by beheading
Pretend how it's great here, and how nothing ever goes wrong here
Become a lifeless country, where all our work and natural resources are reserved for the Sauds
By islamic law, we are all equal. But some of us, are more equal than others.
Next step, is probably to centralize all power to MBS, which he partially already did.
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.
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