Second paragraph of third chapter:
On the screen in front of us was the by then deathly familiar scene of three years earlier: the podium in the hotel ballroom in Chicago; the impressive figure of President Emily Forrester striding up, wiping a few beads of sweat from her forehead and preparing to accept the nomination of her party for a second term; and, in the distance, the face, the assassin’s face that had been enlarged and made familiar to every man, woman, and child in the country since the discovery just a year ago of the private digicam images taken by some still anonymous person in the crowd. It was a face that, after only a two-month search, had been given a name: Tariq Khaldun, minor functionary in the Afghan consulate in Chicago. Justice had been swift: Khaldun, constantly and pathetically shouting his innocence, had been convicted within months and had recently begun serving a life sentence in a maximum-security facility outside Kansas City. As a result, diplomatic relations between the United States and Afghanistan, always fragile, had been strained almost to the breaking point.
Written in 2000, this novel forecasts that the year 2023 will have seen a global financial crisis in 2007, the USA at war with Afghanistan because of a terrorist attack, and the whole world recovering from the effects of a global pandemic. A shadowy group of people are undermining democratic political systems in the West by spreading false information and conspiracy theories on the Internet. Which all sounds pretty impressive in terms of foresight..
Unfortunately it’s just not a very good book. I have not read The Alienist by the same author, but I know it has been widely praised; here, the protagonist, a mild-mannered law professor and behavioral scientist, gets rescued from the Feds by the crew of an invisible airship, led by two siblings, the brother a stereotypical mad-scientist-in-a-wheelchair, the sister becoming our protagonist’s love interest. Infodump follows infodump and our hero eventually evades certain death to wander around central Africa, finishing up in 2024 where in a twist ending it turns out that time travel is possible and history can be altered. From online reviews I can see that most people don’t read that far into it. If you want to try, you can get it here.
Books set in 2023:
Revelations of the Dead-alive (aka London and Its Eccentricities in the Year 2023), by John Banim (1824)
Looking Further Backward, by Arthur Dudley Vinton (1890)
The Bedlam of Immortals, by Enki Bilal (1980)
Islands in the Net, by Bruce Sterling (1988)
The Turing Option, by Harry Harrison with Marvin Minsky (1992)
Sewer, Gas & Electric: The Public Works Trilogy, by Matt Ruff (1997)
Killing Time, by Caleb Carr (2000)
The Free Lunch, by Spider Robinson (2001)
