tech
January 10, 2026
Mass surveillance, the metaverse, making America ‘great again’: the novelists who predicted our present
From Jorge Luis Borges to George Orwell and Margaret Atwood, novelists have foreseen some of the major developments of our age. What can we learn from their prophecies?
TL;DR
- Jorge Luis Borges's 'The Garden of Forking Paths' (1941) explored branching timelines and has been compared to the multiverse hypothesis in quantum physics.
- H.G. Wells's 'The World Set Free' (1914) depicted atomic bombs, influencing physicist Leo Szilard's concept of the nuclear chain reaction.
- Works like Begum Rokeya's 'Sultana's Dream' (1905) and Marge Piercy's 'Woman on the Edge of Time' (1976) presented futuristic societies, including matriarchal and utopian/dystopian visions.
- Octavia E. Butler's novels 'Parable of the Sower' (1993) and 'Parable of the Talents' (1998) depicted post-apocalyptic scenarios with themes of wealth inequality and climate destruction.
- Early 20th-century novels like Zamyatin's 'We' (1924), Huxley's 'Brave New World' (1932), and Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' (1949) foreshadowed modern surveillance societies.
- Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' (1985) and her MaddAddam trilogy explored mass surveillance, bodily control, bioengineering, and corporate power.
- Neal Stephenson's 'Snow Crash' (1992) introduced the 'metaverse,' a concept echoed by Mark Zuckerberg's rebranding of Facebook as Meta.
- William Gibson's 'Neuromancer' (1984) coined the term 'cyberspace.'
- Philip K. Dick's 'The Minority Report' (1956) explored pre-crime concepts, which are now being trialled using data mining and facial recognition.
- Dick's concept of 'kipple' – useless objects and online clutter – is presented as a metaphor for the overwhelming digital detritus of modern life.
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