Truth...or Fiction?

A corporation-owned American government, protecting Big Business through coverups, propoganda and a corrupt legal system

Election of American Presidents more for looking good than actual accomplishments

A deep social schism between the uber-rich, the middle class, and the poor.

Truth ... or fiction?

Environmental decay and chaos

Polluted water and water shortages

Wornout, polluted soil that produces nutritionless food

Foul air in most major cities

Truth... or fiction?

Massive starvation in Third World countries

Contaminated food supplies

Truth ... or fiction?

Antibiotic resistant bacteria

Bacterial and viral disease with no cure

A lagging medical establishment that can't keep up

Truth ... or fiction?

Radical environmentalists trying to protect Mother Nature

Just regular folks trying to get by day to day

Truth .... or fiction?

Just another average news day, right?

Wrong.

All of the above were eerily, predictively written in 1972 in a work of dystopian science fiction by an British science fiction author named John Brunner, entitled "The Sheep Look Up".

Hits strangely close to home, doesn't it?

The title of the book is from a poem by William Blake entitled Lycidas.

The sheep look up and are not fed
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread

I read the book on its original publication date. It has stayed with me all these years, and as history has progressed, I find myself thinking back to it pretty constantly, and re-reading it.

The book is the the middle book in a trilogy of futurist social fiction. The first book was Stand on Zanzibar, with global overpopulation as its theme, and the last was Shockwave Rider .. equally prescient, predicting a global computer network, with terminals in the home a common occurrence. It was even called the web. Brunner also coined the term "worm" which he described as software that reproduces itself across a computer network.

It makes one wonder if time travel is ... truth, or fiction.

If I can get one person to read this book (or better yet, the trilogy) ... one person ... and for it to make the same kind of impression it made on me ... and change their habits ... and to lobby for change in today's world ... then I have done what I set out to do.

By the way, I struggled with the category on this one.  Was it politics?  Environmentalism? Books?  Where did it go.

Maybe you could leave a comment and suggest the best place for it.