There has been a particular pattern in twentieth-century science fiction that the wider culture has not, on the available evidence, fully reckoned with, even now, even as the things that were being warned about are arriving on schedule and in roughly the form they were warned about in.
The pattern is that, across the second half of the twentieth century, a particular set of writers and filmmakers, working in a genre the wider culture treated primarily as entertainment, repeatedly produced what now look like remarkably accurate forecasts of the particular technological and social configurations that have, in fact, characterized the early twenty-first century. The forecasts were not vague. The forecasts were, in many cases, specific in ways that, on examination, are slightly uncanny. The forecasts were also, at the time of their production, almost universally received by the wider culture as imaginative entertainment rather than as the structural warnings they, on close examination, in fact were.
I have been thinking about this pattern, on and off, for years. I want to set down what I have concluded.
The specific examples worth dwelling on
The most striking example, to my mind, is George Orwell’s 1984, published in 1949. The novel, in its depiction of a society in which surveillance is total, language is being actively engineered to constrain thought, and the historical record is being continuously revised by a central authority, was received at the time as a piece of imaginative dystopian fiction. The wider culture read it as a warning about the Soviet Union, which was, in 1949, the obvious reference point for that kind of society. The novel was, of course, partly about that. The novel was also, on close examination, a remarkably accurate forecast of capacities that did not exist in 1949 and that have, by 2026, become routine features of how most developed economies actually operate. The continuous surveillance. The algorithmic curation of what counts as the historical record. The active engineering of acceptable speech. None of these things existed when Orwell was writing. All of them, on examination, are now part of the texture of ordinary life. The warning was specific. The warning was, by the wider culture, treated primarily as a literary achievement rather than as a structural forecast.
Philip K. Dick is the other obvious case. Dick spent the 1960s and 1970s producing, at enormous personal cost, a body of work that is now almost embarrassingly accurate about the technological and social configurations that have, in fact, arrived. The Minority Report, published in 1956, describes a society in which predictive systems are used by law enforcement to identify and detain people before they have actually committed crimes. We now have algorithmic policing systems doing essentially this, in essentially this form, in several major American cities. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, published in 1968 and adapted as Blade Runner, depicts a society in which artificial intelligences have become indistinguishable from humans in conversation, and in which the major social anxiety of the period is no longer how to make them more capable but how to verify whether the entity one is currently interacting with is, in fact, human. We are, in 2026, in approximately this configuration. The Dick stories were received, at the time, as paranoid science fiction. The Dick stories are, in retrospect, the most accurate forecasting document the twentieth century produced. The wider culture, in Dick’s lifetime, treated him as a difficult cult writer. He died in poverty, in 1982, before any of the things he had been warning about had become visible enough for the warnings to be evaluated.
Black Mirror is the more recent case, and the case in which the pattern is most clearly visible because the lag time between the forecast and the arrival has been short enough that most of us can still remember the original episodes. The episode “Nosedive,” from 2016, depicted a society in which a continuous social credit score, derived from the aggregated ratings of every interaction one had, governed access to housing, employment, and social standing. The episode was received as an imaginative piece of cultural satire. China rolled out the early versions of an actual social credit system, with broadly similar architecture, beginning in 2014, and the system has, in the decade since, expanded in ways that essentially confirm the episode’s forecast. The episode “The Entire History of You,” from 2011, depicted a society in which people could replay any moment of their recorded experience in high fidelity. We are, with the various developments in always-on body cameras and the integration of recorded video into everyday life, increasingly close to this. The episode “Be Right Back,” from 2013, depicted a service that could simulate a deceased person, in conversation, by training on their digital traces. We are, in 2026, well past the point at which this is technically possible. The companies offering versions of the service exist. The service is being used.
The pattern across all of these cases is the same. The forecast was produced. The forecast was specific. The forecast was received by the wider culture as entertainment. The thing that was being forecast then, in many cases, arrived. The arrival was greeted, in most cases, with surprise.
Why we received them as entertainment
I want to think about why the wider culture, across these various cases, consistently received the warnings as entertainment rather than as warnings. The pattern is, on examination, structural rather than incidental.
The first reason is that the warnings were produced in a particular genre, and the genre is one the wider culture has, for over a century, classified as entertainment rather than as analysis. Science fiction, by long convention, is the place where ideas about possible futures get explored in the form of stories. The stories are entertaining. The stories are also, in many cases, the only place in the culture where certain kinds of forecasting are permitted to occur, because the rest of the culture’s analytical institutions are not, by their structure, equipped to take seriously possibilities that have not yet arrived. The science fiction writer can say, in a story, things that the policy analyst cannot say, in a white paper, without losing their credibility. The story format is, in some real way, the format in which the early warnings have to be delivered, because no other format will accept them. The format also, however, attaches to the warnings a particular reception, which is that they are received as imaginative material rather than as the analytical material they, on close examination, in fact are.
The second reason is that the things being warned about were, at the time of the warnings, technologically impossible. The wider culture has a particular bias toward dismissing forecasts of things that are not currently possible. The bias is not, in itself, irrational. The bias is, in most cases, a reasonable heuristic for filtering out the enormous volume of speculation that the wider culture is constantly producing. The bias is, however, miscalibrated in a particular way for the specific case of accurate technological forecasting, because the things that turn out to be most important, on the historical record, are precisely the things that were not yet possible at the time they were being forecast. By the time they become possible, the warnings have been forgotten. By the time the things actually arrive, the original warnings are decades old and the culture has, in most cases, moved on to other concerns.
The third reason, and this is the one I find most interesting, is that the warnings were, in many cases, more useful to the wider culture as entertainment than they would have been as warnings. The warnings, received as entertainment, allowed the wider culture to engage with the unsettling possibilities in a way that produced pleasure rather than action. The pleasure is, in some real way, what the wider culture was looking for. The action would have required the wider culture to do something difficult, namely, to actually take seriously the possibility that the warned-about future was on its way and to organize itself, in the present, to prevent or to prepare for it. The entertainment did not require any of this. The entertainment delivered the unsettling possibility in a form that the wider culture could enjoy and then put down. The putting-down is what allowed the warnings to be received without producing the action they would otherwise have warranted.
What this pattern means for the present
The honest implication of all this, for the present, is uncomfortable. The implication is that the warnings that are currently being delivered in the form of science fiction, by the current generation of writers and filmmakers, are very likely to follow the same pattern. They are being received as entertainment. They are, in some fraction of cases, accurate forecasts of things that will, in the next several decades, in fact arrive. We will, in those cases, be surprised by the arrivals. The surprise will be entirely structural, because the warnings will have been available to us all along, and we will have been busy being entertained by them.
I do not know which of the current science fiction warnings are the accurate ones and which are the misses. The whole point of the pattern is that this is not, in real time, knowable. What is knowable, more modestly, is that some non-trivial fraction of the warnings currently being delivered are accurate, and that the standard cultural reflex of treating them all as entertainment is, on the historical record, considerably less reliable than the wider culture is currently treating it as.
The honest position is to take the warnings more seriously than the standard reflex permits. Not all of them. Not as literal forecasts. More modestly, as the structural data points they, on the historical record, in fact have repeatedly turned out to be. The warnings are, in some real way, the most accurate forecasting infrastructure the wider culture has produced. The infrastructure is, by its format, almost guaranteed to be ignored. The ignoring is, on the historical record, what has produced most of the structural surprises of the last fifty years.
Orwell, Dick, the various writers and filmmakers I have not mentioned, the current generation of warners I do not yet know how to identify, are doing, in some real way, work that the wider culture’s analytical institutions are not equipped to do. The work is the work. The fact that it is being delivered in the form of entertainment is, on close examination, not a feature of the warnings themselves but a feature of the only format in which the wider culture is willing to receive them. The format is the problem. The format is also, on the available evidence, what we have. The taking-seriously of the content despite the format is, in some real way, one of the more important pieces of intellectual work available to anyone who has been paying attention to the pattern.
I have, in the last few years, started reading the contemporary science fiction with a different posture than I used to. Not as entertainment exclusively. Also, more modestly, as data. The data is being delivered in a form that the wider culture is calibrated to dismiss. The dismissing is, on the historical record, the most reliable predictor of the surprises that are, in fact, on the way. The not-dismissing is, accordingly, what I am now trying to do. The trying is partial. The trying is also, on the available evidence, more useful than the alternative, which is to continue being entertained by the warnings and surprised by the arrivals.
