Pandemics and collapse
Outbreaks, infertility and the slow failure of systems: what the plague stories got right after 2020.
6 pieces on Nearfi: 6 reviews. Across their 24 tracked predictions, 12 have arrived, 6 are arriving, 3 are near, 2 are far off and 1 went another way. The average P(n) is 72%. Closest to now: Contagion at 100%. Furthest: The Ministry for the Future at 54%.
- ARRIVED A new virus linked to bats emerges in East Asia and becomes a global pandemic within months. Contagion · 2020
- ARRIVING Senior tribal water rights become the decisive asset in the fight over Arizona's water, and governments pay to control how they are used. The Water Knife
- ARRIVED A vaccine against the new virus is developed, approved and being injected within a year of the outbreak. Contagion · 2020
- ARRIVED City dwellers seal themselves in their homes for weeks or months, living off stockpiles while an outbreak runs through the city outside. Station Eleven · 2020
- ARRIVED As Lake Mead falls to record lows, the federal government imposes mandatory cuts on Colorado River deliveries to Arizona and the other lower-basin states. The Water Knife · 2022
- ARRIVING Britain detains asylum seekers en masse in camps, barracks or barges and tries to remove them overseas. Children of Men · est. 2030
- ARRIVING The state supplies a lethal means of suicide to citizens who choose to die. Children of Men · est. 2032
- ARRIVING Office professionals such as accountants lose their jobs to AI in large numbers by the mid-2020s. Years and Years · est. 2032
- ARRIVING A single actor, acting without international agreement, starts injecting aerosols into the stratosphere to dim the sun. The Ministry for the Future · est. 2035
- ARRIVING Central banks use monetary policy to pay for decarbonisation, up to a carbon-backed currency that rewards every tonne of CO2 kept out of the air. The Ministry for the Future · est. 2040
The guide: Sci-Fi About Pandemics and Collapse: 6 Stories About How Societies Fray →
Next Year in Bexhill
Alfonso Cuarón's film is set in 2027, which is now next year. It got the babies wrong and almost everything else right, and it's still the best-made film in our archive.
Hamlet at the Airport
HBO Max's pandemic drama arrived in the middle of a real one and refused to be grim about it. It is the gentlest end of the world on television, and the most useful.
Rumour Has a Higher R
Steven Soderbergh's pandemic procedural is the most accurate film in our archive, and its accuracy is exactly where it went wrong.
Everything Happened, Nobody Decided
Russell T Davies's six-hour family saga got the headlines of the 2020s uncomfortably right, because it was never really about the headlines.
Any Other Business
Kim Stanley Robinson wrote the climate novel that policymakers actually read, which tells you both why it matters and why it so often feels like a meeting.
First in Time, First to Drink
Paolo Bacigalupi's Colorado River thriller reads more like reporting every summer, which is a shame, because the thriller is the weakest thing in it.
More themes: AI and machine minds · Surveillance and scoring · Space · Climate and scarcity · Borders and migration · Clones and genetics · Grief and technology · Memory · Work