Which science-fiction novels have been best at predicting the future?

New Scientist has always been interested in science fiction and its attempts to imagine the future. In 1958, when the magazine was 2 years old, it published an article by Ian S. Menzies in which he wrote: “Like every other form of literature, s. f. ranges from excellent to awful. But the best of science fiction today is far superior to much other fiction.” Elsewhere in the feature, Menzies talked about the risks of the “rapid catching up of reality with fiction”.

It’s true that some of the sci-fi he was reading then was rapidly overtaken by events and, in the process of that, rendered redundant. What Menzies couldn’t know was that other works from that same period would still be regarded as prescient, important or relevant, or even all three, decades later.

So, which sci-fi stories, published over the seven decades of New Scientist’s history, have proved to be both prophetic and enduringly pertinent as the world has changed around them? Here are some of my personal picks.

The 1950s

The Death of Grass by John Christopher (1956) is an English period piece, with all the particular social politics of its era on display (sexism included). Yet somehow it manages to foreshadow a host of modern-day crises, from pandemics and the fragility of food supply lines to the befouling and stripping of the land by big agriculture.

The book opens with the news that a virus is killing grasses; eventually that comes to include all cereal crops. Abruptly, the country’s food reserves are gone, and no more food is coming. The novel’s main characters are mostly middle-class professionals who do a few things “right” early on. They are quick to acquire guns and flee London; also, quick to gun down anyone who tries to stop them. They make their way in convoy through a brown land, heading towards a Cumbrian valley where one of their group has a relative. The valley is gated; one way in, one way out. They think they could be safe there.

First they have to survive their journey, though, and England, within hours, is lawless. I finished the book wishing that I could buy a remote valley and build a wall across the bottom of it.

The 1960s

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein (1966) is the story, set in 2075, of a group of lunar residents who plot to overthrow their overlords on Earth. It’s a great premise rendered quite dull in execution; much of the book reads like the minutes from a local council meeting. In addition, the sexual politics of the colony are filtered through male 1960s sensibilities, adding cringeworthy moments.

The reason this remains a classic is that one of the characters in the book, Mike, is an AI. Not just some 60s idea of what an AI might be, but our idea of an AI. On the very first page, our narrator Mannie (who speaks a futuristic version of English) writes: “Mike was a fair dinkum thinkum, sharpest computer you’ll ever meet… Not that Mike would necessarily give right answer; he wasn’t completely honest.” Remind you of anything?

The 1970s

Ursula K. Le Guin’s astonishing novel The Dispossessed (1974) remains daisy fresh. Le Guin, as her fans will know, could do it all: character, politics, ideas, exquisite writing… and, in this case, spaceships too.

Our hero, Shevek, is a brilliant physicist and also a good man (what a wonderful creation he is!) trying to do right in a future where the human colonies have gone different ways – one into anarchy, for example, another into the rule of an elite – as they struggle with climate change, moral exhaustion, repression, inequality… and much else that we struggle with today. If you’ve never read this one, I highly recommend it.

The 1980s

I’m going to cheat for the 80s and pick two books, because I can’t choose between Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984).

In Atwood’s masterwork, the US has been captured by a radical right-wing group and is now called the Republic of Gilead. Women’s rights have been scrapped. Our hero, named Offred by the new regime, is assigned as a handmaid to a family of loyalists. Her job is to produce a baby for the commander who is her new master. She is, in short, a womb with arms and legs, and nothing more, to Gilead.

I don’t think I need to draw any lines for you, straight or otherwise, from this book written 40 years ago to current events.

Atwood aside, I didn’t want to leave out Neuromancer because its vision of our digital future is so weirdly prescient. Gibson, famously, was no computer expert and wrote the book on a typewriter. Yet he foresaw what cyberspace would actually be like.

Case, our chief protagonist, is a former hacker trying to make ends meet in Japan after his ability to access cyberspace has been taken from him. Then a woman called Molly approaches him, asking him to get involved in a heist. Cue a high-stakes drama in and out of cyberspace. The book is a bit dense to start with, but it’s well worth sticking with.

The 1990s

Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) is a barnstormer of a novel that remains as relevant today as when it was first published. Our hero, Lauren Olamina, is a young woman living in a gated community in a United States that is rapidly falling apart.

Climate change is escalating and the streets are full of desperate people forced into savagery simply to survive. Lauren’s community is hanging on, but soon the chaos is going to come through that gate.

Lauren, still a teenager, develops her own religion and names it Earthseed. Its divine purpose is for humans to colonise the stars. Such a bold vision is preposterous amidst the horror of the world Lauren is forced to make her way through, and yet it sustains her.

The book is a hymn (I think) to the power of taking full responsibility for your life and facing up to the fact that everything changes. Let us hope, as with The Death of Grass, that this version of the future remains in some parts fictional.

Butler wrote a follow-up, Parable of the Talents, in which Lauren sees her dreams begin to come true. A third book in the series remained unfinished when Butler died.

The 2000s

One does need some time to pass before being able to decide if a book has truly got the future right. However, I am reasonably confident that The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (2008) is going to prove to be so.

The story is a brilliant one. Aliens are heading for Earth, and they’re not friendly, but it’s going to take them hundreds of years to arrive. Can the scientists of Earth band together and push science forward so hard that humans will survive the coming invasion? Yes, Liu wrote a book all about physics, but made it gripping!

So, in the case of the book, the science push is all about aliens. But it doesn’t take a big leap of the imagination to suggest that there might be some important real world parallels here. This is the first of a trilogy. The two follow-up novels are also fantastic.

The 2010s and beyond…

I’m going to take a chance on two very different novels from recent times that might, in the future, be viewed as accurate visions.

First, Station Eleven (2014) by Emily St. John Mandel, which essentially predicted the covid-19 pandemic. Except in Mandel’s pandemic, the world was left in ruins.

We follow a travelling group of actors and musicians as they journey between communities in this future world. The book explores the idea that “survival is insufficient”; that humanity needs art, culture and history to truly live. Its ideas still feel extremely relevant 12 years later.

Second, Kim Stanley Robinson’s chronicle of the near future, The Ministry for the Future (2020). Clear-eyed, but essentially optimistic, it describes humanity’s efforts to deal with climate change in the decades to come.

This is a very untraditional book in structure, and although you could say the main character is Mary Murphy, the head of the titular ministry, parts of the book are devoted to (fictional) witness accounts of future events. It’s not an easy read, but then it’s not an easy subject, and this is a massively ambitious work.

Despite the horrors contained in the book, we may end up wishing, in the future, that it had been more prescient, rather than less.

So those are my picks. You may have better ones. In terms of Ian S. Menzies’s central argument seven long decades ago, I think that what he said still holds true. Science fiction continues to range from excellent to awful. But the best of sci-fi today is still far superior to much other fiction. It’s where the big ideas are, simple as that.

Did Emily get it right? Come and join the discussion about the sci-fi novels that have best predicted the future

Emily H. Wilson is author of the Sumerians series and is working on her first sci-fi novel. She is a former editor of New Scientist, and is now the magazine’s science-fiction columnist

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