I was recently interviewed by Noah Berlatsky and his piece just went online at TheGuardian  “Taking after George Orwell and JG Ballard, some of the most prophetic and disturbing fiction about the near future continues to be made on TV and film…”

Part of the reason that the near future is enjoying such a boom at the moment is that the present looks more like the future than ever, according to Gerd Leonhard, futurist and author of Technology vs Humanity. “Basically what’s happening is that science fiction has caught up with us, so what seems like science fiction is now possible,” he told me. He said the central conceit of Her, in which a man falls in love with a computer operating system, “depicts what’s pretty much already here, in that we can consider the computer a friend”. The Black Mirror episode San Junipero, in which people live inside a simulation, Leonhard says, is also quite close to fruition. “That is in a way already happening. We use mobile devices as a kind of second external brain, which we’re using to escape from our own reality. But it’s still outside our bodies. So I think we’re five or seven years away till we get to the point where we can create a fake reality using augmented and virtual reality and holograms.”