True subversion lies in hope. Dystopia or regeneration : learning from science fiction.
Over the past 70 years, science fiction has sold us 2025 as a nightmare: lethal game shows, climate collapse, fatal cyberattacks. Contemporary SF shows that it’s about more than predicting the fall: imagining how we recover. True subversion gives hope.
Based on
Drawn from foundational science-fiction books and research papers from the 20th and 21st centuries, on a nonexhaustive basis. Business Digest, 2025
Orwell (1984, 1949) and Huxley (Brave New World, 1932) drew two roads to hell. Orwell’s is based on fear and pervasive surveillance—a boot crushing a human face. Huxley’s is based on pleasure and comfort—voluntary submission through distraction and consumption. Since then, dystopias have been measured against this dual legacy
For more than half a century, science fiction writers have marked 2025 as a red-alert year. Climate disasters, cyberattacks, death-as-spectacle— it is all there. Today, as we live through that year, another current in SF argues the opposite: what if, after disaster it was time to rebuild? Between collapse and repair, 2025 becomes a dividing line.
#1- 2025: the year science fiction condemned us
2025: a date that sounded like science fiction until recently—and is now the present. Writers chose it as a future close enough to be credible, distant enough to justify extrapolation. In their writing, it is never a bright year. In literature, 2025 is defined by attention-consuming screens, fragmented societies, flooded cities, environmental collapse, and the virtual world displacing the physical one
No rockets to Mars, no progressive utopias: the stories set in 2025 are dystopias. They pose a blunt question: what remains when the state collapses, technology turns against us, and climate overwhelms civilization?
70 years, 7 novels, 7 visions, all dark.
Each one examines our present, with yesterday’s imagination matching today’s headlines.
The Running Man (Stephen King/Richard Bachman, 1982) makes 2025 the era of total spectacle: the poor hunted to death before an avid audience. Television and violence merge; entertainment becomes a political weapon.
With Parable of the Sower (Octavia Butler, 1993) come climate and social collapse. California in flames, barricaded communities, looting. A heroine founds a new faith: “God is Change.” No utopia, only spiritual survival.
Flood (Stephen Baxter, 2008) makes disaster global. The oceans rise, London disappears, civilization sinks. An unescapabale scientific tale: no heroes, just overwhelmed human beings.
In The Peripheral (William Gibson, 2014), 2025 isn’t yet the apocalypse, but is the era of mass precarity: poverty, opioids, dead industries. Technology links this declining world to a post-disaster future: the “Jackpot.”
Cyberstorm (Matthew Mather, 2013) envisions a frozen New York cut off and without power after massive cyberattacks. A realistic thriller: without networks, everything collapses within days.
The Eye of Purgatory (Jacques Spitz, 1939) is the French variation: a painter sees the world decay before his eyes. A dark satire written in 1939, it casts 2025 as the moment when civilization is revealed as already nearing collapse.
Even RoboCop, (1989, franchise adaptation), in some story arcs, sets its corporate nightmare in 2025: full police privatization, justice in shareholders’ hands, government evaporated.
In short, the year 2025 seen by writers is saturated with fear: fear of screens, social violence, rising seas, failing networks, and decaying reality
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