Hmm. There are some dystopias we're already in! Pynchon in "V" (1963) spells out the kind of everyone-sees-the-bad-news-daily future that I live every time I r

Hmm. There are some dystopias we're already in! Pynchon in "V" (1963) spells out the kind of everyone-sees-the-bad-news-daily future that I live every time I read a newspaper or, you know, get a NYT push notification: "" Twenty days before the Dog Star moved into conjunction with the sun, the dog days began. The world started to run more and more afoul of the inanimate. Fifteen were killed in a train wreck near Oaxaca, Mexico, on 1 July. The next day fifteen people died when an apartment house collapsed in Madrid. July 4 a bus fell into a river near Karachi and thirty-one passengers drowned. Thirty-nine more were drowned two days later in a tropical storm in the central Philippines. 9 July the Aegean Islands were hit by an earthquake and tidal waves, which killed forty-three. 14 July a MATS plane crashed after takeoff from McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, killing forty-five. An earthquake at Anjar, India, 21 July, killed 117. From 22 to 24 July floods rampaged in central and southern Iran, killing three hundred. 28 July a bus ran off a ferryboat at Kuopio, Finland, and fifteen were killed. Four petroleum tanks blew up near Dumas, Texas, 29 July, killing nineteen. 1 August, seventeen died in a train wreck near Rio de Janeiro. Fifteen more died the 4th and 5th, in floods in southwest Pennsylvania. 2161 people died the same week in a typhoon which hit Chekiang, Honan and Hopeh Provinces. 7 August six dynamite trucks blew up in Cali, Colombia, killing about 1100. The same day there was a train wreck at Prerov, Czechoslovakia, killing nine. The next day 262 miners, trapped by fire, died in a coal mine under Marcinelle, in Belgium. Ice avalanches on Mont Blanc swept fifteen mountain climbers into the kingdom of death in the week 12 to 18 August. The same week a gas explosion in Monticello, Utah, killed fifteen and a typhoon through Japan and Okinawa killed thirty. Twenty-nine more coal miners died of gas poisoning in a mine in Upper Silesia on 27 August. Also on the 27th a Navy bomber crashed among houses in Sanford, Florida, and killed four. Next day a gas explosion in Montreal killed seven and flash floods in Turkey killed 138. These were the mass deaths. There were also the attendant maimed, malfunctioning, homeless, lorn. It happens every month in a succession of encounters between groups of living and a congruent world - which simply doesn't care. Look in any yearly Almanac, under "Disasters" - which is where the figures above come from. The business is transacted month after month after month. "" The other dystopias I've been wondering about are * Heinlein, "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" (a lot to unpack - with political structures echoed in "The Expanse")? * Heinlein, "The Man Who Sold the Moon"? (we kind of have this; but certainly not "Requiem" because no one would actually try to stop today's space entrepreneurs from going up themselves, certainly not their kids) * Heinlein, "Starship Troopers"? Is anyone anywhere in the US political spectrum still interested in service guaranteeing citizenship, or even service, citizenship, or any kind of principled governance? * Heinlein, the weird multiverse ones? :/ Or the juveniles? * Rand: look I haven't read "Atlas Shrugged" but I don't think the current Great Resignation is quite what she had in mind ;) * Shea & Wilson: Do we in fact already live in an "Illuminatus!" style world where secret sneaky stuff is happening just under the hood, fantasy and reality are wildly intermingled with it being impossible to distinguish them, the elites inhabit the same physical plane as us but somehow have a totally different existence? * Babot, Lee, and Inkol: Does the 1996 Sci-Fi Channel Michael Paré classic "Carver's Gate" in fact perfectly predict our 2060 future where the world has become unbearable due to climate catastrophes and everyone retreats as much as possible to the metaverse, where they live out the only fulfilling parts of their lives in a system controlled by a megacorporation? * Bacigalupi's "The Calorie Man": could almost all agribusiness one day rely on DRM'd food sources controlled by a few megacorporations? We've seen hints of this in a few other novelists' work. * One I can't quite remember, I think a blog post and not a SF story per se, envisioning a rapidly warming world where wealthy nation-states patrol their borders with armed drones who ruthlessly enforce migration rules as hopeless climate refugees flee desperately to inhabitable places? It's hard to see the future. Hope we'll land in a good one.