Psychedelic sci-fi is predicting the future

How our collective imagination looks forward.

When I was thirteen, my older brother breathlessly explained the famous opening scene of A Brave New World. He was reading it in school and was gripped by it.

“In the future, everybody will grow in test tubes! Bureaucrats will determine your social status before your birth!”

I couldn’t tell if he was excited or horrified.

Science fiction written in the last 20 years is much more introspective. Time travel is possible through DMT in your mind (Recursion). Kids in sensory deprivation tanks fight demons threatening their hometown (Stranger Things). Aliens show us how to time travel by internalizing their circular kind of language (Arrival).

Science fiction is, after all, how humans try to imagine the future. In the 50s, society was the cause of all our problems and the potential source of utopia.

These days, our fiction suggests the individual and her perceptions are the centers of all our problems–and the source of all of our solutions.

This seismic shift from being externally focused to being internally focused is the by-product of an emerging field of science that tell us, strangely, each of us is the center of the universe.