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Leah Rachel von Essen reviews genre-bending fiction for Booklist, and writes regularly as a senior contributor at Book Riot. Her blog While Reading and Walking has over 10,000 dedicated followers over several social media outlets, including Instagram. She writes passionately about books in translation, chronic illness and bias in healthcare, queer books, twisty SFF, and magical realism and folklore. She was one of a select few bookstagrammers named to NewCity’s Chicago Lit50 i…
This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Leah Rachel von Essen reviews genre-bending fiction for Booklist, and writes regularly as a senior contributor at Book Riot. Her blog While Reading and Walking has over 10,000 dedicated followers over several social media outlets, including Instagram. She writes passionately about books in translation, chronic illness and bias in healthcare, queer books, twisty SFF, and magical realism and folklore. She was one of a select few bookstagrammers named to NewCity’s Chicago Lit50 in 2022. She is an avid traveler, a passionate fan of women’s basketball and soccer, and a lifelong learner. Twitter: @reading_while
View All posts by Leah Rachel von Essen
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.
Leah Rachel von Essen reviews genre-bending fiction for Booklist, and writes regularly as a senior contributor at Book Riot. Her blog While Reading and Walking has over 10,000 dedicated followers over several social media outlets, including Instagram. She writes passionately about books in translation, chronic illness and bias in healthcare, queer books, twisty SFF, and magical realism and folklore. She was one of a select few bookstagrammers named to NewCity’s Chicago Lit50 in 2022. She is an avid traveler, a passionate fan of women’s basketball and soccer, and a lifelong learner. Twitter: @reading_while
View All posts by Leah Rachel von Essen
A Friend of the Earth by T.C. Boyle (2000)
When Boyle wrote this work of climate fiction, whether or not global warming was real was still a subject for presidential debate. Boyle predicted, correctly, that it would become clear by 2025 that it was real. Honestly, his predictions might make us feel better about our 2025 realities: he thought almost all non-human creatures would be extinct by now. That said, his depictions of a former environmentalist trying to stay alive in the midst of a horrific 2025 California drought and disastrous storms will sound awfully familiar.
Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling (1988)
Digital currency? Data havens? Wearable computers you wear on your wrist? Drones? Companies rising to take over the role of national superpowers? A European union, privately funded armies, inequalities rising from who can and who can’t access digital resources? While this cyberpunk novel is reportedly a little thin—in classic late 80’s fashion, it’s packed with action and some main-character plot armor—it’s hard to argue with Sterling’s predictions of a world in which money and corporations rule the day from 2023 to 2025.
The Running Man by Stephen King (1982)
This one, in its way, is distressingly accurate. In the year of 2025, Ben Richards can’t afford to take his daughter to the doctor (accurate). He only has one option: reality TV (I think *Supermarket Sweep *would be mine, *The Amazing Race *if I had time to train for the running, and I know for a fact y’all already know the reality show you think you could win too). In The Running Man, every house is required by law to have a TV that runs the Games Network. In our 2025, enough of us have them, not to mention our phones in our pockets, that they don’t have to mandate it. (Bonus: an adaptation starring Glen Powell is coming out in November 2025!)
The Lake at the End of the World by Caroline MacDonald (1988)
This prediction was luckily not quite accurate, because it would have us emerging in 2025 from a nuclear apocalypse. Diana and her parents live by a “mystical” lake, isolated and lonely. Hector’s community, meanwhile, is emerging from underground caves. Both have been taught not to trust strangers in this coming-of-age dystopian YA novel. I’m happy to say that this 1980s tale is decidedly *not *accurate. Even if the world goes tomorrow, it will still be several decades off (and honestly, decades seems optimistic given what we know of nuclear disaster) before anyone’s emerging into a new Earth. So we can end on that (pleasant?) note.
Titan by John Varley (1979)
This Locus Award–winning novel had us going to Saturn in 2025, so clearly it thought the space program was going to be much more seriously funded and supported throughout the 2000s. It’s a sci-fi classic about a crew stumbling on a planet named Gaea, but needless to say, it isn’t particularly accurate to our time!
Classic sci-fi wasn’t very diverse, but that has improved a lot in recent years. Check out An A-Z Alphabet of SFF Authors of Color and 8 Science Fiction Novels by Authors of Color for more sci-fi by authors of color.
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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.