A lot of the sci-fi stuff in Orwell and Huxley, and cyberpunk too, looks “eerily similar to what’s real” because it was built to look that way, on purpose. It was science fiction, but derived from events that were genuinely going on in real life. Only people didn’t talk about them much in polite society. The readers hadn’t caught on yet.
Bruce Sterling qna on /. – http://m.slashdot.org/story/195971
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 