Not too long ago, I saw the following passage from The Fellowship of the Ring, and if you didn't know Bilbo Baggins was talking about the One Ring…
You'd have thought he was talking about smartphones.
Take a read yourself:
It sure sounds like smartphones to me!
Now, I'm not going to pretend I'm sat atop a dais, proudly declaring my independence from technology.
That I'm not.
I'm very much one of those folk who pat their pockets before heading out or leaving somewhere. That said, I'm no fiend either. Beyond replying to emails and texts, browsing the web, and occasionally having a cheeky peep to see if Uber Eats has got a promo code for me…
My phone usage would probably depress most tech nerds.
Still, it's weird how fiction has a habit of predicting societal shifts. For decades, sci-fi has predicted space colonisation, robotics, AI, driverless vehicles, flying cars, and even pandemics eerily similar to COVID.
And lo and behold:
We're moving ever closer to colonising Mars… Ordinary folk will soon be able to buy a Tesla robot… AI is disrupting entire industries… We've got driverless taxis and, as of a couple of weeks ago…
Real-world tests of flying cars.
And who can forget that pandemic at the beginning of the decade?
Ah, I miss the 90s.
So yeah, fiction can offer a fascinating (and sometimes dystopian) glimpse of the future, but d'you know what else it can do?
It can also be a wonderful means of escaping a reality that grows more and more warped by the year.
You want my totally biased prediction?
I suspect appetites for fantasy — particularly those grounded in magical, epic settings — will become increasingly more popular in the coming decades as our own world grows ever more futuristic, and frankly…
Unrecognisable.
If you want a fantasy realm to escape to, I've already built one. It's called Estos, and you can dive into one of the stories set there right here:
https://djjwatsonstore.com/products/TDR-Bundle
DJJW