Most science fiction writers got the future wrong. That’s OK. We don’t read sci-fi for predictions and, often, books set in the future tell us far more about the times they written in. But two 20th Century authors stand out as both relevant and prescient to anyone living in 2017. The great JG Ballard is one, and Philip K Dick, the other.
While the majority of 20th Century science fiction writers predicted full automation, huge advances in propulsion technology or the colonisation of other planets, Ballard and Dick were visionaries of inner space, telling us what life would feel like for 21st Century (and later) humans. The sense of a body politic spun out of control; of a world where the difference between truth and a lie has been eroded; the depersonalisation of private life and the ever-widening gap between those who can shield themselves from the future, at least temporarily, and those who can’t, looms large in Dick’s magnificently unique and unruly oeuvre.
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