Literature can be surprisingly accurate in predicting what lies ahead
When scientists hailed a breakthrough this month – a man with end-stage heart disease was given a genetically modified pig’s heart – some non-scientists found the idea familiar. The procedure had already been described by Malorie Blackman in her novel Pig Heart Boy.
Reality, it seems, can make fictions come true, and Blackman joins a distinguished line – Jonathan Swift (who posited, among other things, two moons for Mars); Aldous Huxley (oral contraception, mood medicine, test-tube babies); HG Wells (atomic bombs); Orwell (telescreens, mass surveillance) – of writers whose works acquire, over the years, the tingle of prescience. More recently a number of novelists were blindsided by an actual pandemic overtaking their invented plagues. Christina Sweeney-Baird’s The End of Men was finished in December 2019, Bethany Clift’s Last One at the Party was published in February 2021 and Oana Aristide’s Under the Blue a month later. Lawrence Wright’s The End of October (May 2020) even imagines a coronavirus arising in east Asia. And Joanna Kavenna’s 2019 novel Zed, set in a near future controlled by a tech giant, becomes more real every day.
