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, convergent, and parallel times”. The garden of forking paths is infinite.
It’s often said that Borges’s story foreshadows the multiverse hypothesis in quantum physics – first proposed by Hugh Everett in 1957, then popularised by Bryce DeWitt in the 1970s as the “many worlds interpretation” of quantum mechanics. In a 2005 essay, The Garden of the Forking Worlds, the physicist Alberto Rojo investigated this claim. Did the physicists read Borges? Or did Borges read the universe? It turned out that Bryce DeWitt hadn’t known about Borges’s garden. When Rojo questioned Borges, he also denied everything: “This is really curious,” he said, “because the only thing I know about physics comes from my father, who once showed me how a barometer works.” He added: “Physicists are so imaginative!”
As Rojo’s mock-inquiry demonstrates, fictional foreshadowing is a strange art. We don’t live in Borges’s garden, so it’s impossible to go back in time, split the universe and ascertain what happens if Borges never writes about splitting the universe. Would Everett still propose his universe-splicing theory? The universe is mysterious; so is the interplay of cause and effect. HG Wells’s 1914 futuristic novel The World Set Free portrays the devastating effects of compact “atomic bombs”. The physicist Leo Szilard read Wells’s novel in 1932 and conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933. We can’t enter a parallel world wherein Wells thrives as a draper’s apprentice, stops writing and becomes the distinguished manager of Hyde’s Drapery Emporium in Southsea. Yet, one line of influence is clear. When Szilard realised the significance of his theory, he felt afraid: “Knowing what it would mean – and I knew because I had read HG Wells.”
The future is an uncharted territory, a place beyond maps. This affords writers a certain imaginative freedom: to create dystopias, utopias, experiments and imaginary societies. In Begum Rokeya’s Sultana’s Dream (1905) – which appeared a decade before Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland – a traveller ventures into a matriarchal hi-tech society where hard labour is done “by electricity”, it’s easy to cook and transport options include a sort of hydrogen helicopter. Marge Piercy’s 1976 novel Woman on the Edge of Time considers both utopian and dystopian futures: a peaceful rural commune versus a torrid hyper-capitalist city where the rich extend their lifespans as the poor struggle to survive. The suggestion of Piercy’s novel is that these futures slide in and out of existence, responsive to events in the present. Or perhaps they only exist in the mind of the protagonist. Octavia E Butler’s 1993 Parable of the Sower and 1998 Parable of the Talents are set in a post-apocalyptic California. Once again the wealthy immure themselves against dystopia, sequestered in fortified communities. The climate is wrecked; people long for the good old days. A nefarious president swears he will “Make America Great Again” – looking backwards to Reagan, forwards to Maga. Butler describes her characters in a state of surreal detachment; their climate apocalypse feels “old hat in science fiction”. This sense of reality as implausible, eerily akin to meta-fiction, foreshadows our own ironic-dystopian present.
Then there are the writers who predicted our surveillance society: Yevgeny Zamyatin in We (English translation published in 1924), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). These novels are so absurdly relevant to our age that they have become shorthand for discussing government overreach, mass surveillance, and the erosion of privacy.
