4 Times Don DeLillo Predicted the Future

Most of us would consider Don DeLillo to be among the Great American Novelists, the author of towering works of classic, cerebral, (but approachable) American-flavored fiction such as White Noise and Underworld. And now, with his cryonics-themed new novel Zero K, DeLillo goes all-in on science fiction. But he’s actually been doing it for years. Good sci-fi—or speculative fiction, the more descriptive umbrella title purveyors of the genre prefer—attempts to depict the future based on where humanity seems to be headed at the time of writing. By that definition, that’s DeLillo. He’s uncannily nailed the future many times before, particularly in the four novels below.

White Noise (1985)
A recurring motif in White Noise is media saturation. Jack Gladney and his large, blended family (which also are more common today than in 1985), always have at least two televisions blaring somewhere in their house, transfixing children and adults alike. DeLillo writes, “For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.” This passage also demonstrates how technology has made the world smaller…by choking it with information. “What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of the day. But nobody actually knows anything.” In that quote, DeLillo has predicted both the rise of the Internet and online culture.
Another main theme of the novel is an increased awareness and fear of “toxic” products in daily life, far before that was a commonplace worry. (There’s a chemical leak in the novel, or as DeLillo calls it, an “Airborne Toxic Event”—a phrase which has made its way into the vernacular.) This fear that pollution and toxins are omnipresent preceded the present-day “green” movement by decades.

Mao II (1991)
In Mao II DeLillo contrasts isolation (one character is a reclusive writer, another is homeless) with crowds (terrorists, angry mobs). DeLillo calls his shot in the last line of the prologue: “The future belongs to crowds.” And the future, or rather the present, does. In spite of, or maybe because of, the lonely Internet culture DeLillo suggested in White Noise, culture is in the midst of a new kind of tribalism. Crowds are a very alluring way to connect with something bigger, or something important, like the righteous and dedicated groups in Mao II. DeLillo’s novel shows crowds of homeless people living in parks, a gigantic sea of mourners at a funeral, and a mass wedding at a baseball stadium. Today we’ve got “crowdsourcing,” “crowd funding,” social media, massive protests, and massive grassroots campaigns for perceived political outsiders. Over twenty years ago, DeLillo saw this coming.

Cosmopolis (2003)
Cosmopolis unfolds over the course of one day, primarily through the lens of one character. Eric Packer, a young hedge fund manager, rides in the back of an absurdly well-appointed limo through Manhattan on route to a haircut. He’s delayed by a traffic jams owing to a presidential motorcade and an anti-Wall Street riot. By the end of the novel, Packer has lost billions when the foreign money markets crumble. Wall Street protestors? Financial meltdown? Those things happened for real in 2008 and 2009—DeLillo just got the order of the two things reversed.

Americana (1971)
DeLillo’s first novel concerns TV executive David Bell, who helps produce tone-deaf documentaries about indigenous peoples. David and his cohorts find ways to make their productions as easy as possible, caring less about the truth and more about whether it makes for good TV or not. Eventually growing disenchanted, David leaves his corporate job behind to hit the road and make a documentary about the experience. Once more, he learns how easy it is to manipulative the truth of nonfiction film in favor of artificially constructing a more palatable, more commercial story. In other words, DeLillo’s 1971 novel is about…reality television.
What is your favorite DeLillo novel?