Is there science fiction designed to pass as ordinary fiction in the far future?

[Boojatta]

[cliffordu]

1. Are there bogus news reports designed to pass as real news reports

in the near future??

[bengalherder]

2. Yeah...

Gibson's Neuromancer and Stephenson's Snow Crash are already beginning to read as real-life novels, which they most definitely weren't in the early eighties when they were written. I'd also put Phillip K Dick up there- his stuff is surreal at times but often prescient and eerily accurate (written in the 60's and 70's).

And sometimes hack writer Robert Aspirin put out a book thirty years ago called 'The Cold Cash War' about corporations warring each other and various still sovereign countries using mercenaries such as Xe. The story would probably have very few strictly 'sci-fi' elements at this time. Been years since I read it, but it stuck with me.

I'm sure there are others, If anyone else knows of any more, I'd be happy to read 'em ...;-)

Edit to add: Add Paul DiPhillipo to the list. 'Ribofunk' is becoming more real all the time.

[pitohui]

3. mostly philip k dick

and i wouldn't necessarily call it the far future

what is "everyman" in the far future?

[Sequoia]

6. Agree. His novel, "The Sheep Look Up" is so ON today.

Enviornmentalist, contaminated food probably causing Mad Cow or some such icky disease.

[iris27]

4. I've seen some that tried, but underestimated the time we'd need to get there.

I have a collection of sci-fi short stories from the 40's and 50's that are an amusing combination of technological goals we haven't met and societal attitudes that we've long surpassed, and are set in the 1980's through the year 2000. So, say, it's 1985, and ladies are barefoot and pregnant despite there being flying cars and colonies on the moon.

[SheilaT]

5. Yes.

Jack McDevitt has written two series of novels, both set in about the 24th Century. One centers on an archeologist who lives off somewhere in some other planetary system in our galaxy. The other revolves around a woman who is a starship pilot and a graduate of what's basically the Star Fleet Academy. They are science fiction in that they take place in the future, and faster than light travel has been achieved. But in other ways they are very ordinary novels about particular people and the events that happen to them. Some of them also include supposed newspaper headlines of the day.

Both series are very much 20th/21st Century people who happen to live and work several hundred years in the future.

[MrCoffee]

7. Try Jack Womack's books

The DryCo series is the closest I can think of to your description...they're not far future, though.