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This post is auto-generated from RSS feed BOOK RIOT. Source: Did Sci-Fi Get 2025 Right?

Science fiction is an attempt to reach into our future, jumping off our coolest, best-researched, or wildest science and technology and diving into all its possibilities. From Jules Verne inventing solar sails in From the Earth to the Moon in 1865 (the first solar sail was used in 2010), to depicting electronic subs a century before they’d first run, to Douglas Adams depicting real-time automatic audio translation in 1980, from warnings about genetic engineering and visions of space travel, science fiction has always been making uncanny predictions about what humans will want from our tech, and where it could take us.

But have any sci-fi novels correctly predicted 2025? We should be grateful that some didn’t get 2025 quite right. Plenty of films depict 2025 as a post-apocalyptic hellscape (and we’re not quite there yet). Power Rangers S.P.D. thought we’d already be coexisting with aliens. All of the books below had predictions for what we’d be dealing with in 2025—and some were more prescient than others.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (1993) This one shook a lot of readers earlier this year. Butler is considered a sci-fi visionary for a reason. She used her knowledge of history, social trends, and political cycles to hone this one to a perfect prediction. Parable of the Sower is about a young woman who becomes a leader in the midst of violence and climate change disaster, and it features unprecedented wildfires in Los Angeles and California in early 2025. They take place amidst the rule of a populist president (whose slogan is “Make America Great Again”) who draws his power from sowing fear, and in a United States seeped in wealth inequality…which also felt on point for 2025. For more insights into her foresight, check out A Few Rules For Predicting The Future, released in pocket format earlier this year.

All Access members, read on for five more sci-fi books’ predictions of 2025.

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Need more science fiction recs? Check out our list of the bestselling sci-fi books of all time, or read through our list of realistic sci-fi novels that do the hard work and build off real concepts and research.

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