Ooops. That already happened

Comic panel labeled Arthur, writer. He says Arrgh! It's happening again! No publisher... no readers... I can't compete with cat videos! Sound effects read TAP TAP TAP TAP! CLICK CLACK! A rejected manuscript is stamped CANCELLED, DUE TO LACK OF INTEREST. OCT 2024.

Ooops. That already happened

September 28, 2026

1–2 minutes

The problem with writing near-future satire is that, while you’re trying to be ridiculous, reality does it all so effortlessly. I had a side-character in BOLG & THE BEAUTIFUL – an Irish faerie, who was a trans-geographist, who had decided he was born in the wrong country, and that he identified as Italian and thence-forth demanded you accept him as that.

Then there’s zombie books. I mean, unthinking, destructive hordes are so passé these days. It’s an issue with near-future, aside from the satire. Events catch up with you, there is no flying car.

My shelves are full of them: books I read when they were just speculative, and actually – LAST STAND ON ZANZIBAR or MAKE ROOM, MAKE ROOM, to name two, where the Malthusian hell we’re supposed to already be in, has failed to materialize, and, given the falling Total Fertility Rate, seem quite unlikely.

Honestly, it has made reading these books difficult.

So: how do you future-proof your book?

8 responses to “Ooops. That already happened”

Draven

September 28, 2026 at 4:05 am

I’m smacking into this problem right now because my MC in the comic I’m working on was supposed to be a medevac pilot in the Iran War….

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Moe Lane

September 28, 2026 at 7:32 am

My Fermi Resolution post-apocalyptic fantasy series starts in 2100 AD. At that point, I’ll either be dead and won’t care, or I’ll be living the post-Singularity immortal life and also won’t care.

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TXRed

September 28, 2026 at 9:22 am

I sent the characters down a different leg of the Pants of Time. Oh, and had an alien species land in roughly the late Bronze Age in what is now the Murtal in Austria, and decide to blend in and hide among the humans. [Cat Among Dragons, and Powers, world]

Like Moe, my other stuff is far future on colony worlds, so I’m pretty much Bee-Effect proof.

*Bee Effect – when a satire becomes the truth 3 months to 5 years later. Often characterized by someone exclaiming, “Darnit, Bee, you’re not supposed to be prophecy!” Also known to happen with the DuffleBlog between 2008-2018.

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capvideo

September 28, 2026 at 10:29 am

Make Room, Make Room is an odd little book. On the one hand, I find it very hard to believe that Harry Harrison wrote satire this subtle, but on the other hand… his overpopulation is less than 344 million people. That was less than twice the population of the United States in 1966. Was there really that little room left in the United States in 1966 that he thought it would produce the conditions in the book? You’d need ten or twenty times that.

But if we had chosen to believe the Malthusians and introduce, in 1966, population control, forced rationing, and a chokehold on progress as people like Toffler were recommending? We might very well end up with a world like that in Make Room, Make Room: no air conditioning, dirty water, apartment buildings overflowing, unreliable energy, low-quality fuel, and a population with neither courage nor initiative.

It rains a lot in this book, and Harrison goes on and on about people getting soaked by the rain, taking shelter from it, and so on. One character stumbled into a lucrative rainwater storage business. It seems completely alien and unthinkable to everyone in the book, including that character: after losing the business, that character eats snow, and never thinks about how frozen water could duplicate and improve that lost source of affluence.

Harrison clearly shows, without ever having a character remark on it, that high taxes and other government policies enslave those with smaller families to those with larger, workers to non-workers. If Harrison were writing a warning that overpopulation was an excuse by an expert class to inflict pain and misery on everyone, I’m not sure how he’d have written it differently.

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Pam Uphoff

September 28, 2026 at 6:20 pm

Fortunately I didn’t not get technical in my characters having handy little minicomputers in their pockets . . . Technical details could be deadly, as fast as tech changes . . .

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Mary Catelli

September 28, 2026 at 8:08 pm

High fantasy is handy that way.

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Frank

September 28, 2026 at 8:21 pm

Well, you can always wait for the future to make it true. I wrote several of the stories/chapters of Advance Guards in the late 70’s. It proposes a near future Los Angeles where everybody works over “the set”, everything necessary is delivered via “the chute”, and nobody ever leaves the house. It sat in a drawer for 50 years, and then Covidiocy came along, and it seemed more like contemporary fiction rather than science fiction.

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Dan Lane

September 28, 2026 at 9:28 pm

Add double weight of future to your proofing shots and if the work survives the hit, it may be viable for about 2.5 years until the Other Side gets better weapons.

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