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, splice the universe and ascertain what happens if Borges never writes about splicing 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 of surveillance capitalism that it seems our tech barons have used them not as satirical warnings but as motivational texts. In all three futuristic societies, an ideological super-state prohibits any form of privacy. Solitude is mistrusted because it encourages contemplation and possible independence of thought. Even the privacy of the inner mind is – wherever possible – violated. A successor to these novels is Margaret Atwood’s 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale, another prescient story of mass surveillance and the control of women’s bodies by reactionary governments. Meanwhile, Atwood’s MaddAdam trilogy (Oryx and Crake, 2003; The Year of the Flood, 2009; MaddAdam, 2013) foregrounds ethical dilemmas concerning bioengineering, pandemics and monopolistic corporations.
In Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, the “metaverse” is an immersive virtual reality, requiring a headset. In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg famously rebranded the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp as Meta and stated his intention to develop a “metaverse”. William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer imagined a VR-scape called the Matrix. This novel brought the term “cyberspace” into, well, cyberspace (and beyond). In Philip K Dick’s The Minority Report (1956), pre-crime units employ psychics to predict future crimes so the police can make preemptive arrests. What happens, Dick asks, if a crime is predicted but the future malefactor changes their mind? Are they still pre-guilty? Fast-forward to our present and, yes, pre-crime operations are being trialled across the UK. No psychics required; oracular law enforcement agencies use data mining, predictive algorithms and facial recognition instead. What could possibly go wrong?
Finally, there is Dick’s endlessly helpful idea of “kipple”, coined in his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. For Dick, “Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers.” The first law of kipple is that “it drives out nonkipple”. You can’t win against kipple, “except temporarily and maybe in one spot”. Kipple is now all the algo-rubbish online, our bulging inboxes, the AI slop. Could Dick have predicted this? Can some prescient novelists really see the future?
Future fictions are, as Atwood has said, really deep examinations of the present. From there, as Borges shows, it’s an enormous guessing game. Some guesses at the future are better than others. Some are strangely brilliant. Could Dick have envisioned, all the way back in the 1960s, a world where humans would be swamped by the flotsam and jetsam of modern life – or was he really writing about overwhelm in his own present moment? Either way, his advice still applies, both prescient and inspiring: maybe all we can do is find a balance between the pressures of kipple and nonkipple – the useless junk and the objects of value. When the tech barons have taken the dystopias for utopias, perhaps this is as utopian as it gets. Fight kipple!
• Seven by Joanna Kavenna is published by Faber. To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
