If someone from 2017 traveled back to 1997 and wrote a novel about 2017 without people knowing he was a time traveler, it would be categorized as dystopian fiction.
Not only that, but hamfisted, overwrought YA dystopian fiction
Right, so the cold war is back on but this time it’s between the US and North Korea and the american president is a serial rapist billionaire with ties to the Russian government who shits in a gold toilet, fucks off to play golf every weekend, and legislates to prevent religious minorities from entering the country while simultaneously pushing to allow ivory into the country so his henchman sons can kill elephants to their hearts’ content. most cities in the US don’t have clean drinking water especially in minority areas, the wealth disparity and corruption is among the worst in the world, infrastructure hasn’t been updated in about 40 years, innocent people – men, women, children, and other – are murdered en masse by the state, Native American tribes are drowning in the oil they knew was going to spill all over their sovereign land, and overall everything’s basically exactly the same as it was in the 1950s except now there’s the internet and the country is run by a literal fucking toddler.
meanwhile the rest of the world is pretty much as bad as it’s ever been, but seems to be slowly getting better over time. or it would be, if the US weren’t still a global hegemon intent on starting racial wars at every given opportunity and melting the ice caps practically by design. and then turning away people forced to seek refuge from those same wars and the effects of those melting ice caps
….yeah if I read a book like that in the ‘90s even as a literal fucking child I would’ve said it lacked subtlety.
Also, natural resources are dying and the climate is changing drastically because of human exploitation and yet still a large part of the population believe profit is better than saving humankind.