Novelists who foresaw mass surveillance, the metaverse and today’s dilemmas

This year marks the 85th anniversary of Jorge Luis Borges’s The Garden of Forking Paths (1941), a story about chance, labyrinths and an impossible novel, and prompts a review of writers whose fictions seem to anticipate aspects of our present — from multiverses to surveillance and virtual worlds.

Borges’s story, in which all possible paths are chosen, has been linked to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics; the physicist Alberto Rojo investigated the claim and found Bryce DeWitt had not known about Borges, and Borges himself denied a physics influence, saying, “the only thing I know about physics comes from my father, who once showed me how a barometer works.” By contrast, HG Wells’s The World Set Free did feed directly into scientific thinking: Leo Szilard read Wells in 1932 and conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, later saying, “Knowing what it would mean – and I knew because I had read HG Wells.” Other writers have explored technological and political futures that map uncannily onto our era: Begum Rokeya’s Sultana’s Dream, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, and Octavia E.

Butler’s Parable novels with their imagery of climate collapse and fortified wealth where a president vows to “Make America Great Again.” Dystopian warnings from Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell sit alongside Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and her MaddAdam trilogy, which raise questions about bioengineering, pandemics and corporate power.

Key Topics

Culture, Jorge Luis Borges, Many Worlds, Surveillance Capitalism, Metaverse, Predictive Policing