The writer as prophet and policy guru
In fiction, the future was always fact: MAGA, LA fires, moon landing
Welcome to This Week, Those Books, your rundown on books that resonate with the week’s big news story.
🎧 Would you rather listen? We do a human (not AI) readalong too.
Please consider supporting this news literacy effort so that we can keep it freely accessible to our community of nearly 11,000 followers in 120 countries. If you can’t pay for whatever reason, just email thisweekthosebooks@substack.com and we’ll give you full access, including to the archives, no questions asked.
The Big Story:
Writers imagined these fictional scenarios, decades, even centuries, before they became fact:
A 21st century Christian fundamentalist United States led by a president with the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’. [Parable of the Talents, published 1998]
Uncontrollable fires in Los Angeles in 2025 as the world battles climate change. [Parable of the Sower, published 1993]
Reaching Mars around 2026. [Red Mars, published 1992]
Airplanes used in warfare in the year 2100. [When the Sleeper Wakes, published 1899]
Profound disconnection with society and nature as people communicate via an electronic screen, forerunner of the internet. [The Machine Stops, published 1909]
Unsurprisingly, the UK authorities today, like the US after the 9/11 attacks, are working with writers to imagine the future in order to prepare for it.
This week, we look at these stories:
And here, free to access, is an earlier post on sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s influential novel The Ministry for the Future
The Back Story:
Allen Stroud,1 chair of the British Science Fiction Association, is part of the Creative Futures project. He says it puts “science fiction writers in conversation with the UK Ministry of Defence to identify the challenges we will face in the future.”2
Last year, Nato published a graphic novel, Nato 20993 and Nato 2099 – The Science Fiction Anthology.4 Both imagined the military alliance’s future 150 years after the organisation was founded. Nato marked its 75th anniversary in 2024. Written by sci-fi authors, the stories take us to the furthest reaches of imagination. They foresee telepathic weaponry, libraries as new battlefield frontlines and the strange case of an AI nation-state not bound by territory but able to become a Nato member.
After 9/11, the US military reportedly asked Hollywood screenwriters to think of what the future might hold.5
Jules Verne’s 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon used a cannon instead of a rocket but it launched from Florida, just as in the Apollo missions.
This Week’s Books:
Parable of the Sower
By: Octavia Butler
Publisher: Four Walls Eight Windows
Year: 1993
Parable of the Talents
By: Octavia Butler
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Year: 1998
Octavia Butler's 1990s novels came five years apart and are so prophetic the writer might have been denounced as a witch in an earlier age.
The first book, set in Los Angeles in 2025, shows a world reeling from the effects of climate change and deadly fires. The second, set in the United States in 2032, shows a country run by Christian fundamentalists, while President Andrew Steele Jarret touts a MAGA slogan and an agenda to return America to glory. Non-Christian faiths are disdained, the country has re-education camps, slavery is back and war declared on Alaska, the first state to leave the union. Canada, which supports Alaska’s initiative, serves as a refuge for many Americans.
The series is about a young Black woman Lauren Oya Olimana. She suffers from a condition called “hyper-empathy” or “sharing”, which allows her to feel other people’s pain (and pleasure). She creates a new religion Earthseed and the second book, narrated by her daughter Larkin, tells us about Earthseed’s first community. As a non-Christian group, Earthseed faces oppression from Jarret’s fundamentalist movement. Meanwhile, the Earth is becoming uninhabitable for human beings.
Choice quotes:
“That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.”
– Parable of the Sower“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.”
– Parable of the Talents
The Machine Stops
By: E M Forster
Publisher: The Oxford and Cambridge Review
Year: 1909
This 1909 short story is set in a world where every human being lives solely within the confines of their “room”, communicating with others via a system that is like Zoom or Teams. No one sees anything at first hand, nor has any new ideas. No one is so daring as to touch or speak to the other face-to-face. The Machine rules over everyone and everything. It was a bold vision by Forster at a time the telephone existed but television did not and the internet could scarcely have been imagined.
Choice quote:
“I want to see you not through the Machine,” said Kuno. “I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”
“Oh, hush!” said his mother, vaguely shocked. “You mustn’t say anything against the Machine.”
“Why not?”
“One mustn’t.”
“You talk as if a god had made the Machine,” cried the other. “I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything.”
I hope you find This Week, Those Books useful, thoughtful, and…a conversation starter. It’s a small operation here at TWTB, and support from readers like you helps keep this news literacy project going.
Please email to tell us what you think of the topic or the books: thisweekthosebooks@substack.com
Connect on LinkedIn | Twitter | Bluesky | Facebook | Threads | YouTube
“Allen Stroud,” accessed January 29, 2025, https://www.allenstroud.com/.
“UK Ministry of Defence enlists sci-fi writers to prepare for dystopian futures,” Guardian, January 19, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jan/19/ministry-of-defence-enlists-sci-fi-writers-to-prepare-for-dystopian-futures.
“Resilience Beyond Observed Capabilities,” Coventry University, UK, accessed January 29, 2025, https://rboc.ac.uk/. The project says: “The starting point is a scenario of a catastrophic attack on digital and energy networks in the year 2051.”
Nato 2099, (Nato Defense College, 2024). https://www.ndc.nato.int/nato2099/read.php.
Florence Gaub, Nato 2099 – The science fiction anthology (Nato Defense College, 2024). https://www.ndc.nato.int/news/news.php?icode=1920.
“Film-makers help US army with tactics,” Guardian, October 10, 2001, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2001/oct/10/afghanistan.world.
Fascinating!