F.M. Busby’s The Breeds of Man was written in 1988. Many of his expectations for what was then the future are surprising not just because they’re wrong, but because it took me a fair amount of effort to remember that back in 1988 I wouldn’t have dismissed them as silly.
Most of the book takes place in an unspecified year that is no earlier than 2005 and probably no later than 2020. One of the most striking features of the story is that a powerful person is able to exert pressure on the news media to kill a story that at least one reporter is working on. The story would have generated enough publicity that in 1988 it would have been somewhat doubtful whether it could have been suppressed, but it would have been the kind of possibility that in 1988 I would have expected to generate some entertaining debates. But today, the idea that the reporter couldn’t advance her career by taking the story to an alternate news channel seems too foreign for even a moderately crazy conspiracy theorist to propose.
The book is not particularly bad as science fiction goes, but it’s full of places where I’m almost shocked at how primitive the flow of information seems. And when I think back, I remember that for more than half my life I lived in that primitive world.