Ask Lemmy

How far ahead do you want to go? The Borg are a more likely future phase of humanity than Star Trek's Federation, though without FTL travel, we're gonna be stuck crawling from rock to rock in our own neighbourhood for a very long time.

There's also a bit in old kid's TV show The Girl From Tomorrow where, at one point, something mucks up the timeline so badly that the future she comes from ceases to exist and all of the Earth's land ends up an uninhabitable desert, devoid of life. That seems pretty likely too.

These two things are not mutually exclusive either.

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.

People are talking about really wonderful interesting things, but I can't even choose between those I'm thinking about.

Star Wars EU - because that's what I see around. Lots of stupidity, evil and decay, but in the end there's the sky and the life with all its beauty. The old part of it, which mostly was happening after Empire's institution while the rebels were not something close to victory in anyone's opinion.

Vacuum Flowers - that's the "worse is better" evolutionary optimism. That it will all become only worse, there's no good defeating evil, we will all die, but - life finds a way, humanity finds a way, and so on. It will go on.

Heinlein's Door into Summer - some parts are too much like our reality.

Actually I think all 3 have the same general idea, I just can't quite catch it.

Contagion and Children of Men - while they didn't look far into the future and dealt with existing problems, it's still horrifyingly accurate.

Idiocracy/Dont look up/1984/Judge Dredd

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.

100% its cyberpunk. corpo takeover with having to use technology to get by even when it is bad for you.

Idiocracy but mixed with the Neuromancer series and 1984.

WALL-E. We just don't have a way to escape yet, but the rest is happening regardless.

V for Vendetta

A combination of Snow Crash and Idiocracy

Her.

I could see the Golgafrinchan telephone sanitizer situation coming to pass.

The Water Knife by Paolo Baccigalupi is pretty on the nose for the near future of the southern US

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.

Our history sounds shockingly similar to Animal Farm.

Revolt against the Ottoman colonizers

The Hashemite dynasty rules the Hejaz for 10 years

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

Destroy history of our past

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.

All of the negatives from Metropolis 2001

Metropolis (2001): How Capitalism Produces Fascism

The Temporal Messages of Metropolis

Elon Musk = Duke Red

A combination of all the worst bits of the worst ones

The Simpsons

If we don't dodge that bullet, Years and Years. Or Neuromancer.

The Road.

Penultimate Truth. Predicted containing the cattle using fear of something that doesn't even exist in reality.

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.