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Mass surveillance, the metaverse, making America ‘great again’: the novelists who predicted our present

From Jorge Luis Borges to George Orwell and Margaret Atwood, novelists have foreseen some of the major developments of our age. What can we learn from their prophecies?This year marks 100 years since the first demonstration of television in London. Elizabeth II sent the first royal email in 1976. The first meeting of the Lancashire Association of Change Ringers took place in 1876. All notable anniversaries. But I’m going with 2026 as the 85th anniversary of a great short story: Jorge Luis Borges’s The Garden of Forking Paths (1941). It’s about chance, labyrinths and an impossible novel. Ts’ui Pên, an ancestor of the narrator, sets himself the task of writing a novel with a cast of thousands: “an enormous guessing game, or parable, in which the subject is time”. In most novels, when a character reaches a fork in the path, they must choose: this way, or that way. Yet in Ts’ui Pên’s novel, all possible paths are chosen. This creates “a growing, dizzying web of divergent,...


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