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  • 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.

  • As bland and forgettable as it was, the film adaptation of "Tomorrowland."

    The premise (or at least my takeaway) basically being that, we might have been headed toward a techno-utopia of optimistic and bright developments, but greed and cynicism took over the spirit of invention, and everyone collectively became cynical and pessimistic about the future as a result.

    Technology and those who claimed to wield it became enemies of the people.

    Many of our most popular "near future" stories and entertainment are about societal collapse, disaster, the worst of humanity turning on themselves, and technology being used for its worst purposes. We almost enjoy morbidly indulging in forecasting our own bad ending, over and over and over. Warnings became franchises co-opted by the bad powers they warned against.

    Partially, we'll get a crappy future because we've all been conditioned and used to the idea that it's inevitable and there's nothing we can do about it. This reduces our will to fight it, and instead we settle for merely enduring it.

    If we had hope and fire and a taste of something better, we'd stop giving in to doomerism and just accepting it when it keeps getting worse.

    This is why I really like the emergence of Solar Punk. It's a hopeful and bright rebellion against endless neon acid rain tumbling down towering corporate fortresses, rusting everybody's work-leased cyber-limbs as they gig-work 24/7 to afford neural software updates.

    Instead, it's about embracing communitarianism, careful stewardship of natural resources, sustainable existence in tandem with nature instead of against it, open and free knowledge to all, endless invention with human thriving in mind.

    If people actually believed, not merely that's how it should be, but that it could be ...we could make some real progress.

  • I don't know about closest, but definitely most likely, Tank Girl. Basically, water and power will be extreme scarcities for the majority and a corporation that bottles up the water to keep it from becoming free through rain and owns all of central power grid will be the effective government. It will take a few more decades for the water to get bottled up by Nestlé, et al., and the water infrastructure to fail in more cities. And then the fossil fuel industry to run out of resources and collapse and thus leave only the few nuclear reactors as the only major power sources, without renewables investment, which can be grabbed by the water owners by saying they need the power to collect the water bottles and they need to "secure" the dangerous reactors with the military hardware they collected to protect "their" water sources from protesters and poor people over the years.

  • I think that it'd have to be one of those countless near-future works that are set in what basically amounts to being the present-day world.

    I think that if you're looking for something other than that, something more in a far-out setting, you'd need to ask something like "what futuristic work do you think society will most resemble in 200 years" or something like that. That forces things down the road a bit, and makes one pick among different predictions about how society will change in the future.

93 comments