This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the first public demonstration of television in London. Elizabeth II she sent the first royal email in 1976. These are all significant but naive anniversaries in a time when we are witnessing plans to annex the territory of a sovereign European state to a superpower from another continent, a war in the middle of Europe, allies deploying troops against each other and planning sanctions against Big Brother and yesterday's ally... However, 2026 brings a quieter but extremely important literary anniversary: 85 years since the publication of the short story "The Garden of Forking Paths" (1941). Jorge Luis Borges.
Borges' story is about chance, labyrinths, and the impossible novel. Ts'ui Pen, the ancestor of the storyteller, attempts to write a work with thousands of characters: a novel that would be, as he himself says, "a vast guessing game, a parable whose theme is time." Unlike classical novels, in which the hero at a crossroads must choose one path, in Ts'ui Pen's novel all possible paths are chosen. Thus a network of parallel, diverging, and intersecting times is created - an infinite garden of possibilities.
Borges' story is often said to foreshadow the multiverse hypothesis in quantum physics, first proposed by Hugh Everett 1957, and then it is Brajs DeVit popularized in the 1970s as the “many-worlds interpretation” of quantum mechanics. In a 2005 essay, “The Garden of Branching Worlds,” the physicist Alberto Roho examines this claim. Did physicists read Borges? Or did Borges read the universe?
So, decades after Borges, physicists would be talking about the multiverse and the “many-worlds interpretation” of quantum mechanics. It is often claimed that Borges predicted this. However, as the physicist’s witty investigation shows Albert Roy, Bryce DeWitt, one of the popularizers of this theory, did not know about Borges, nor did Borges himself claim to understand physics. “I only know how a barometer works,” the writer said, adding that physicists are extremely imaginative.
However, the question remains: does literature sometimes really go ahead of science or does it just take a more precise look at the present?
The connection between fiction and reality is sometimes startlingly clear. H. Dž. Vels described the destructive power of atomic weapons in his novel "The World Liberated" in 1914. Two decades later, the physicist Leo Szilard, inspired by the novel, formulated the idea of a nuclear chain reaction. When he realized what his discovery meant, he admitted that he was overcome with fear because, as he said, “I knew what it meant, having read Wells.”
The future is uncharted territory, a space off the maps. This gives writers a certain imaginative freedom: to create dystopias, utopias, experiments, and fictional societies.
The novel "A Woman on the Edge of Time" Mardž Pirs from 1976 considers both utopian and dystopian futures: a peaceful rural commune versus a blazing hypercapitalist metropolis where the rich prolong their lifespans while the poor struggle to survive. The novel suggests that these futures appear and disappear depending on events in the present. Or perhaps they exist only in the mind of the protagonist. Novels Octavius E. Butler “The Parable of the Sower” (1993) and “The Parable of the Talents” (1998) are set in post-apocalyptic California. Once again, the wealthy are walled off from the dystopia, locked away in gated communities. The climate is destroyed; people long for “the good old days.” A sinister president vows to “Make America Great Again,” much like the MAGA movement. This sense of reality as something improbable, almost metafictional, foreshadows our own ironic-dystopian present.
But despite such examples, literature rarely imagines the future as a world filled with realized utopias. On the contrary, great writers almost invariably choose dystopia, for example, those who envisioned a surveillance society: Zamyatinovo "We" (1920), Huxley "Brave New World" (1932), Orwell “1984” (1949) does not offer images of happy, stable communities, but of societies in which happiness is imposed, freedom is abolished, and individuality is reduced to a flaw of the system. These novels seem so frighteningly relevant today in the era of capitalism that controls everything that seems as if today’s technological masters were using them not as satirical warnings but as motivational manuals. In all three societies, the ideological superstate prohibits all forms of privacy. Solitude is suspected because it encourages reflection and the possible independence of thought. Even the privacy of the inner mind – wherever possible – is violated.
The successor to these novels is "The Handmaid's Tale" Margaret Atwood from 1985, another prophetic read about the mass surveillance and control of women’s bodies in a reactionary regime. Meanwhile, her “MaddAdam” trilogy (“Oryx and Crake”, 2003; “The Year of the Flood”, 2009; MaddAdam, 2013) foregrounds the ethical dilemmas of biogenetics, pandemics, and monopolistic corporations.
The reason for this is not only in the dark socio-political-economic conditions of the modern world. The reason is also in the very nature of serious literature. High-quality art does not tolerate banal optimism and self-sufficient celebration of material well-being. Its deepest layers arise from the depiction of misfortunes, those that individuals and entire societies, often in the blind pursuit of their own happiness, produce for each other.
It is interesting, however, that at the same time we do not say goodbye so easily to scientific-technical-technological utopias. The reason is simple: in this domain there have been almost no disappointments. On the contrary, countless technological utopias have come true. People dreamed of flying, of long-distance communication, of computers, of space travel. Today, these ideas are part of everyday life, so normalized that they have ceased to excite us. Utopias have quietly and unceremoniously died out, not because they failed, but because they were fulfilled.
The problem arises when these realized technological utopias begin to turn into dystopias. Algorithmic surveillance, mass data collection, predictive policing, digital behavior control...all of these are real, operational versions of ideas that once existed only in literature. The metaverse from “Snow Crash,” cyberspace from “Neuromancer,” the “pre-crime” from Dick’s story “Minority Report” are no longer metaphors.
Just Philip K. Dick offers perhaps the most accurate picture of our time. In the novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” he introduces the term kipple - useless objects and waste that accumulate inexorably and suppress everything of value. Today, kipple is digital: spam, notifications, algorithmic content without meaning, AI waste that floods the networks and our attention.
So we return to the basic question: have writers really seen the future? As Margaret Atwood said, futuristic literature is not prophecy, but an in-depth analysis of the present. Writers do not predict, they observe carefully. And from that observation, sometimes, emerge astonishingly accurate images of the world to come.
In a time when dystopias are proclaimed as progress, perhaps the most radical idea is the simplest: finding a balance between frivolity and what truly has value.
The fight against the kipl seems to be just beginning.
H. G. Wells, a reformist in a world without illusions
If he were alive today, H. G. Wells would probably still be writing about the future, not because he believed in easy utopias, but because he never gave up on the idea that man can improve himself and the world can be arranged.
Although he began as an anthropological pessimist (the Eloi and Morlocks of The Time Traveler still seem frighteningly relevant today), Wells balanced hope and warning throughout his creative life. His utopias and dystopias had the same goal: to challenge the reader, to make them think, to unsettle them.
Perhaps today he would be skeptical of cosmic fantasies of escape from an overpopulated Earth. Wells believed, above all, in responsibility here and now. In that sense, he remains what he always was: a reformist who knows the world is not perfect but still thinks it is worth trying.
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