I was looking for some near-future sci fi recommendations, particularly anything with a compelling prediction of what the next 10-20 years will look like.
Not a book, but I like to look at very niche reddit communities and imagine if their tech was adopted by the entire market. For example, years ago video game streamers were a thing, but a small niche was streaming "irl" - just walking down the street/etc. Now this is a huge section on twitch.
A current example is vtubers (and hololive). Its just youtubers/streamers, but their using very sophisticated live motion capture, so instead of a video of a person you're watching a 3d real-time animated person. Body capture, face capture, advanced 3d modeling, etc. Take this niche and imagine it exists in the mainstream - does every person have a digital version of themselves? etc.
Futurists prefer "forecasting" rather than "prediction" since the future is constructed from the past (that is, data) and not from the examination of pigeon entrails, tea leaves, or flakey models with deus ex machina solutions.
David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming would be a good choice. It's a snapshot of forecast reality, not near-future sci fi, and scary.
Also worthwhile, David Pogue's How to Prepare for Climate Change: A Practical Guide to Surviving the Chaos. Similar to the Wallace-Wells book, but from a different perspective.
Cormack McCarthy's The Road is a disturbing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive when life on earth dies off from the bottom up. It is set a bit further in the future than the others, at a point where the die off of humans is happening. Collapse and death is mostly low tech.
It does seem like we are living in a utopian sci fi novel these days (pandemic aside). We have ignored the warnings of pending collapse until there is no longer time to correct course or even adapt. So it's likely we wail be living in environmental chaos for the next 20 years and then slip into extinction over the next 10 as we experience first hand the last great die-off.
I went to hear Jacques Cousteau speak at UCLA in about 1975 and he was predicting that the oceans would be dead in 25 years. Somewhat alarmist, I suppose -- but maybe we all did some things to avert it. Sort of like Jonah preaching to Ninevah.
Huxley's Brave New World is sure to be more telling of how things will actually play out.
We won't give up our liberties if they are taken by force, but rather give them up out of apathy. Apathy as a result of the cessation of our easy desires.
There are many parallels between trends we all see coming in the 20s and themes of Huxley's '32 work.
I think it's a mix of both. And you could add Animal Farm to the mix as well.
Animal Farm is a book that is often forgotten and I think it's a must read. After you read it you can see things in politicians that you wouldn't before.
Came here to say this. Just finished reading it and there are so many parallels between the book and our current trajectory. Namely, as technology continues to abstract struggle from our daily lives and entertainment becomes more of an immersive escape, the motivation to solve true personal and societal problems slowly disappears.
A current example is vtubers (and hololive). Its just youtubers/streamers, but their using very sophisticated live motion capture, so instead of a video of a person you're watching a 3d real-time animated person. Body capture, face capture, advanced 3d modeling, etc. Take this niche and imagine it exists in the mainstream - does every person have a digital version of themselves? etc.