Another author of science fiction who made some chillingly accurate predictions was Hoshi Shinichi[1], whose works are generally not that well known in the West

Another author of science fiction who made some chillingly accurate predictions was Hoshi Shinichi[1], whose works are generally not that well known in the West, even among some of the broader scifi fandom. In particular, I vividly remember reading his novella "Voice Net"[2] in college. From the late author's (now inconsistently accessible) website: > Shinichi Hoshi's futuristic story is set in the banally dubbed "Honeydew Condominium," a modern, twelve-story complex just outside the city. It starts at the gift shop on the building's first floor. The lackluster shop owner routinely uses his telephone to do just about everything: from counting cash register receipts to monitoring his vital signs. The story follows the seasons as it climbs floor to floor, watching people's lives change under an increasingly ubiquitous network of machines.[3] The novella was written in 1969, so he imagines everything as spoken over the telephone, and yet he describes: a service of personal information managers who call you each morning with reminders including friends' birthdays and local events, banking conducted almost entirely remotely with dubious sharing of spending habits, and many other eerily accurate parallels to today. At the time I was first reading the book, Facebook had just started to nag you about your friends' birthdays. Voice Net has a slow burn meta-narrative through its trajectory of short stories (each chapter) that builds in a very unsettling way and is really a treat. I won't say anything more about it here. It's a pity his work isn't more widely known in the West, though Voice Net was available on Apple's iBook store (which does not have a web portal I can link to here) when I first read it and appears to be on Amazon's Kindle store[4], though the latter may not be a translated version. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinichi_Hoshi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinichi_Hoshi [2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24751717-voice-net# https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24751717-voice-net# [3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180827191647/http://shinichihoshi.com/voice_net.html https://web.archive.org/web/20180827191647/http://shinichiho... [4]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L40GY50 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L40GY50