Fiction That Feels Uncomfortably Real

This post on fiction that feels a little too real first appeared in The Deep Dive, where you’ll find insights, opinions, and deep dives written by experts and tailored for the consummate Book Nerd who wants to know even more about all things books. These titles would make excellent book club picks, full of unnerving prescience perfect for unpacking in a juicy discussion. So go forth, get (un)comfy, and dive into the mess.

One of my middle grade science teachers said something years ago that rocked my little brain. He told us how so many of science’s modern inventions first started as ideas in books. I’d been a bookworm for years by then, and I had an interest in science so that little tidbit had me shooketh.

I’ve held on to it all these years, and have even offered it up as a topic for our contributors to write about. While I now know that there’s more to it than just scientists becoming inspired by something they see in fiction—I still marvel when I read something in fiction, then see it unfold in reality. There are a few times this has happened within the last few years that I thought to share.

Some of these instances involve science fiction, while some of them need a trigger warning. Virtually all of them are messy.

The Earthseed Series by Octavia E. Butler Predicted Trump

Octavia Butler, marvel that she was, just seems to be getting her more mainstream flowers the past few years. And she so deserves them—she wrote award-winning science fiction that incorporated Black American spiritualism, culture, and history in ways that hadn’t really been seen yet.

In her 1998 novel Parable of the Talents, the second in the Earthseed series, she predicts the rise of Trump, right down to his catchphrase. For The New Yorker, Abby Aguirre wrote how, in the book, “The Donner Administration has written off science, but a more immediate threat lurks: a violent movement is being whipped up by a new Presidential candidate, Andrew Steele Jarret, a Texas senator and religious zealot who is running on a platform to ‘make American great again.'”

How did she know??

Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and the U.S. Carceral System

Chain-Gang All-Stars hasn’t so much predicted things—at least not yet. It’s more a comment on the current state of the U.S. carceral system, how depraved and bloody it can be, and what it may turn into if it continues along the current path it’s on. It was just published last year, and since then, the U.S. has only expanded its carcerality. In late June this year, the Supreme Court ruled that being houseless is punishable by law. There is also the case of Marcellus Williams, a Black man sentenced to death who everyone (even the prosecutors who originally tried him) says is innocent, but who the governor of Missouri decided to have executed anyway.

Yellowface by R. F. Kuang and White Writers Being Raggedy

Yellowface was another banger of a book from last year, and I know Kuang had to have witnessed some foolishness behind the scenes, because there were a few kind of high profile stories that came out regarding white authors plagiarizing authors of color, hating on non-white authors, or even pretending to be of color themselves. It was a hot mess.

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