I wrote this piece as a world-building exercise for a work-in-progress—a speculative fiction project in which an outside intelligence studies Earth from afar, categorizing the planet’s political systems during its age of crisis. What began as a fictional exercise quickly took on a sharper edge. It was supposed to be a background document for myself, a tool to help shape the political backdrop of the story I’m building. But as I wrote, it became impossible to ignore how closely this fictional taxonomy mirrors the present-day world . We still hear terms like “First World” and “Third World”—phrases rooted in Cold War alliances and economic shorthand—but those categories no longer describe the world we live in. Democratic erosion, climate collapse, plutocracy, expansionism, and systemic violence have reshaped the global order. The old labels simply don’t fit anymore. This piece is still technically fiction—but I’m sharing it here because it feels increasingly difficult to call it ...

  I Am Sorry… To the people of the future—I am sorry. I'm sorry someone read my book and decided to make it real. I'm sorry that, instead of heeding the cautionary tale woven into my words, the takeaway was a blueprint for control and manipulation. I mean, it was just fiction. Speculative fiction… science fiction… nothing that could ever happen in the real world, right? Who would have guessed that authors like Asimov and Banks are to blame for the actions of Musk and Thiel? We wouldn't be enduring Zuckerberg's metaverse if Neal Stephenson had just left his pen safely on his desk. "Pens don't change the future," you say. "People change the future." Are you sure? The Guardian asks us, "Will sci-fi end up destroying the world? " as it lays blame on "skewed interpretations of classic works." It seems we've been banning the wrong books all along. It wasn't the books about our past we needed to fear, but those about our f...