Last year we reviewed speculative fiction set in 2025, comparing what creatives imagined in the past versus the world we actually got. So what about 2026?
A few notes on what I am not covering. There are a lot of stories that are too recent to be particularly interesting for purposes of this exercise. For example, there is a book (that I have not read) called The Future of Another Timeline, which apparently features scenes set in 2026. But it was published in 2019. Stories set less than 10 years into the future are really intended as “just around the corner” stories, rather than a prognostic leap into the unknown. There will probably be exceptions, but we’re most interested in stories imaging 2026 decades in advance.
Other projects just don’t have the narrative depth to produce an interesting post. I don’t think 2005’s Doom movie tells us much about the world of 2026 beyond “wow, what a difference 20 years makes in the kinds of roles and budgets Dwayne ‘the Rock’ Johnson will accept.”
Finally, this exercise will obviously skew toward set-in-2026 content that appeals to me for other reasons. If it was on my reading list or my watch list, it's more likely to be featured. This is decidedly a personalized take, not a comprehensive or impartial one.
Now on to the fiction of 2026.
Den-noh Coil (released in 2007)
In last year’s fiction post, I wrote about Rainbow’s End, a story that is largely about children navigating the world of 2026 through the (literal) lens of augmented reality. Den-noh Coil has a lot in common with Rainbow’s End. It deals with a near-future 2026 where citizens of a Japanese town wear augmented reality glasses to view a virtual overlay on the real world. As in Rainbow’s End, augmented reality provides a parallel, invisible world, with its own conflicts and rewards, and children are the primary explorers of this world. The show was produced by Madhouse, a prolific studio that has recently adapted Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End to anime, but I hadn’t heard of Den-noh Coil until I looked it up for this exercise.
Like Rainbow’s Children, Den-noh Coil supposes that AR in 2026 is more advanced and more integrated into society than it is in real-world 2026, but it gets many details right. I won’t spoil too much, but the story takes folklore, ghost stories, and local superstition and reinterprets it through a new lens of technology.
For example, the characters use “tags” to hack the virtual world; the tags look a lot like Shinto ofuda talismans. And the digital enforcers that serve as antagonists for much of the story cannot pass through shrine gates, much like mythological ghosts or demons. But the protagonist eventually learns that the real reason is bureaucracy; the shrines are controlled by a different ministry than the bureau that runs the AR tech, so the virtual enforcers come to a dead stop at the torii because of intergovernmental rivalries. This is a fun idea, and the series does a good job of exploring ideas of non-literal/superimposed spaces, a subject explored in both fiction (The City & the City, The Cartographers) and non-fiction (Unruly Places).
Other story beats feel prescient too, like a “bus graveyard” (implicitly the aftermath of widespread autonomous car usage ending public transit) and a scene where children have to figure out how to use a rotary phone.
Many aspects of Den-noh Coil's world are reminiscent of efforts by Meta and other companies to create value in the AR/VR space. The story's valuable “kira bugs” are like NFTs. The scavenger hunt aspect of the story, as well as the prominence of virtual pets, foreshadows 2016’s summer of Pokémon Go. Per Wikipedia, the founder of Niantic Labs, the company that powered Pokémon Go, is a fan of Den-noh Coil, so this may be a life-imitates-art situation. In a way, the only surprise is that today – 10 years after the peak of Pokémon Go – that feels like the exception, as a successfully monetized instance of AR, rather than the first of many such products in a full-blown AR world, as Den-noh Coil predicted.
Den-noh Coil is not perfect. In particular, the plot is unnecessarily convoluted, with much of the mystery delivered by monologue near the end of the show. But the worldbuilding and vibe are a great example of creators guessing what the world will be like in 20 years, and coming up with an answer that resonates with IRL 2026’s headlines.
There Will Come Soft Rains (published in 1950)
You can read this short story online, and doing so will only take a few minutes, so I won’t avoid spoilers here.
A lot of futuristic fiction is understandably vague about when exactly events takes place. So for purposes of this 2026-in-fiction exercise, I want to thank Ray Bradbury for explicitly specifying that this short story takes place on August 4, 2026. That’s today.
This story is prescient in describing a “smart” home, complete with programmed alarm clock (“Alexa, snooze 20 minutes”) and automated vacuums that aren’t too different from modern Roombas. The story presumes a kind of analog infrastructure that is very different from our digital present, but the effect is quite the same. Bridge-and-martini night is a little quaint for 2026, but the vibe is right.
TWCSR is one of those classic stories that encourages the reader to think anew about nuclear annihilation by changing the frame of reference. We are introduced to an idyllic home. We gradually realize something is wrong. Where are the people who live in this home? The story adds clues until we understand we are seeing machine servants mindlessly performing the rituals of a civilization that is now dead.
I wish I could say that the story's warning of nuclear annihilation was a quaint relic of another time... alas, reader, I cannot. We can at least say we beat this prediction, but whether we have avoided this fate or merely delayed it remains to be seen.
Parable of the Sower (published in 1993)
I didn’t even realize I owned this; it was hiding on my bookshelf at home. Like TWCSR, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower blesses us with explicitly dated chapters, beginning in July 20, 2024 and running through October 10, 2027. Written in an epistolary style as a teenager’s diary, the story begins in a small community in California that is struggling to survive as a combination of environmental, economic, and political disruptions leaves the United States teetering on the brink of collapse.
This is a society that is most of the way toward a true Fallout/Mad Max post-apocalypse, but the slide is slow and irregular, region by region, social group by social group. Government services are gradually failing and jobs are disappearing, but there are just enough remnants of normality that the people in the narrator’s community can cling to the hope that the world as they knew it will make a comeback. The narrator accepts that the old world is not going to return, and begins an ambitious plan to create new communities that can grow from the ashes of the old.
I’ve read and watched a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction, and there is much, much more of it that is set in the aftermath of the collapse, than the collapse itself. Most stories are more interested in the settled world after the collapse is done, or perhaps a back-and-forth with the pre-collapse world; The Last of Us, Oryx and Crake, and Station 11 all land in this space. There are a lot of signs of long-past suffering; and flashbacks that foreshadow suffering to come; but the show elides the actual suffering that a nuclear holocaust would bring. No shade on stories that go that route, but I appreciate that Parable grits its way through the ugliness of the collapse day-by-day. I was reminded at times of Blindness by José Saramago, which is perhaps the most unflinching and difficult societal collapse story I have read.
The protagonist's concept for a new community is a poetic, pseudo-religious idea called “Earthseed.” It begins with a humble self-organized community that she builds over the course of the book, but she has ambitious plans for civilization not only to regrow within a small holdfast in California, but to spread and grow even beyond the Earth itself.
A manned mission to Mars is a plot point early in the story, and Butler wasn’t the only SF writer who picked the mid-2020s as a plausible period for Mars exploration. Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (which I shortlisted for this post, but didn’t get around to finishing) also takes place in 2026. I think these '90s writers were directionally correct on the Mars idea, just a bit early (like with the AR stuff).
Speaking of Mars, it is interesting that the most prominent real-world proponent of an Earthseed-like concept in real-life 2026 is... Elon Musk, who also wants humanity to extend beyond earth to ensure its survival. Butler’s protagonist is, uh, decidedly different from Elon in any number of ways. The passage of 30 years makes for strange bedfellows.
Parable of the Sower’s sequel, Parable of the Talents, takes place in 2032, so if I’m still doing this series six years from now, I’ll read it then. Butler had planned to write several more Parable books, but understandably needed a break from their heaviness, writing Fledging instead. Fledgling is actually the only other Butler book I’ve read, and while two books is not a pattern, it is hard to miss that both are about a female protagonist in the western United States setting out to create an intentional, interracial community.
Worldbuilding Takeaways
Den-noh Coil presents a parallel world with opt-in dangers. Those who ignore the AR world entirely are safe from it, but those who engage with it are subject to its dangers. This is a good model for how forbidden magic can work in a fantasy game, or forbidden knowledge in a mythos game. Ignorance is safety. If you get in over your head, remember that you opted in.
TWCSR works as a location you could drop into any post-apocalyptic game. It's one thing to say the bombs fell and everyone died, and quite another to make the players feel it. RPGs can’t replicate every neat trick that authors use, but they can set up a location-based mystery and let players add up the clues until the “ohhhh…” moment when they figure out what’s going on.
Parable is a heavier hang than most people are going to want in their Apocalypse World games, but I do think its ideas of community formation could inform tough decisions characters would face in such a setting. How do you decide who you can trust? How do you decide who has the skills and resources your community needs? What do you do when those two categories don’t overlap?
Next year: the speculative fiction of 2027. Do you like long takes of Clive Owen running through gray British murk? Then you're going to love 2027. See you then.
