Field notes from a little way ahead.https://nearfi.co/2026-11-01T08:00:00ZNearfihttps://nearfi.co/essays/the-nearness-index2026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Why every Nearfi review carries two verdicts, one for the art and one for the future, and why the second one keeps changing.

https://nearfi.co/essays/the-kindest-machine2026-11-01T08:00:00Z

We were afraid the machines would be cold. The trouble is that they're kinder than we are, and children are learning from them what kindness should cost.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/years-and-years-20192026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Russell T Davies's six-hour family saga got the headlines of the 2020s uncomfortably right, because it was never really about the headlines.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/upload-20202026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Greg Daniels's digital-afterlife comedy has one great joke, that heaven is a subscription tier, and spends four seasons explaining it to us.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/upgrade-20182026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Leigh Whannell's three-million-dollar revenge thriller is a B-movie with one genuinely frightening idea. It isn't the chip in the spine. It's the polite voice asking if it may.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/the-water-knife2026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Paolo Bacigalupi's Colorado River thriller reads more like reporting every summer, which is a shame, because the thriller is the weakest thing in it.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/the-truman-show-19982026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Peter Weir's comedy about a man who is the last to know he's on television predicted almost everything about the next thirty years, except that we'd climb into the dome by choice.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/the-ministry-for-the-future2026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Kim Stanley Robinson wrote the climate novel that policymakers actually read, which tells you both why it matters and why it so often feels like a meeting.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/the-circle2026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Dave Eggers's campus satire predicted the doorbell camera, the genealogy dragnet and the single login, and still reads like a lecture delivered through a megaphone.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/super-sad-true-love-story2026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Gary Shteyngart's 2010 satire got the pendant, the feed and the ranking almost exactly right, then staged the end of America as a bank run that never came.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/strange-days-19952026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Kathryn Bigelow's millennium-eve thriller invented a machine that records memories, then accidentally predicted the far more important device in every bystander's pocket.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/station-eleven-20212026-11-01T08:00:00Z

HBO Max's pandemic drama arrived in the middle of a real one and refused to be grim about it. It is the gentlest end of the world on television, and the most useful.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/stand-on-zanzibar2026-11-01T08:00:00Z

John Brunner's 1968 doorstop is famous for guessing the headcount, the shootings and the man called Obomi, but its sharpest prediction is the way it makes you read.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/snow-crash2026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Silicon Valley read Neal Stephenson's 1992 satire as a product roadmap, built the wrong part of it, and walked straight into the parts it was laughing at.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/sleep-dealer-20082026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Alex Rivera's low-budget Sundance film is clumsy as drama and almost frighteningly sharp as economics, and its central idea, labour that crosses the border without the worker, is starting to come true.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/severance-20222026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Apple's office horror is the most beautiful thing ever made about a cubicle, and its sharpest prophecy has nothing to do with the chip in Mark's head.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/robot-frank-20122026-11-01T08:00:00Z

A modest Sundance comedy about an old thief and his care robot got the loneliness right, the library wrong, and the jailbreak a decade early.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/pantheon-20222026-11-01T08:00:00Z

AMC's animated upload drama was wiped from its own service before it finished, survived on other people's servers, and turned out to be the smartest story about digital minds on television.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/never-let-me-go2026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Kazuo Ishiguro's novel about cloned organ donors is set in a past that never happened, and it's the most exact book we know about how people agree to be used.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/neuromancer2026-11-01T08:00:00Z

William Gibson typed the internet's founding myth on a manual typewriter, got the headcount exactly right and the shape completely wrong, and wrote the best AI-escape story we still have.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/moon-20092026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Duncan Jones's five-million-dollar debut got the mineral, the payroll and the machine right, and the machine is the only one who comes out of it well.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/minority-report-20022026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Spielberg's sleekest machine is a chase film with a philosophy degree, and it predicted almost everything except where we'd be looking.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/little-brother2026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Cory Doctorow wrote his teenage hacker novel in eight furious weeks in 2007. It's half thriller, half instruction manual, and the manual is the part that came true.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/klara-and-the-sun2026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Ishiguro's solar-powered Artificial Friend is the most devout character in modern fiction, and the one thing in her world nobody has bothered to monetise.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/humans-20152026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Channel 4's suburban robot drama had the sharpest first series of any British science fiction in years, then spent two more proving that a good premise is not the same as a good plot.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/her-20132026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Spike Jonze's soft-focus romance predicted the product, the marketing and the loneliness, and then wrote an ending that the industry has quietly agreed never to ship.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/gattaca-19972026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Andrew Niccol's gorgeous, schematic debut guessed the technology almost exactly and cast the wrong villain. The gatekeeper turned out to be the parents.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/ex-machina-20142026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Alex Garland's glass-box thriller is smarter about founders than about machines, and its sharpest prediction hides in the twist everyone remembers for the wrong reason.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/devs-20202026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Alex Garland's quantum-computer miniseries is the most beautiful thing on this list and the most inert. Its machine is impossible, but its tech campus is exactly right.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/contagion-20112026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Steven Soderbergh's pandemic procedural is the most accurate film in our archive, and its accuracy is exactly where it went wrong.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/children-of-men-20062026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Alfonso Cuarón's film is set in 2027, which is now next year. It got the babies wrong and almost everything else right, and it's still the best-made film in our archive.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/black-mirror-nosedive2026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Black Mirror's prettiest hour imagined one glowing score for every human being. We built a thousand small ones instead, and hid most of them.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/black-mirror-hang-the-dj2026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Black Mirror's sweetest romance is also its slyest advert, and the dating apps have spent the years since trying to build its last scene.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/black-mirror-the-entire-history-of-you2026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Jesse Armstrong's 44-minute marriage autopsy is the best thing in Black Mirror's first series, and its gadget is now a feature you can switch on in Windows settings.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/black-mirror-be-right-back2026-11-01T08:00:00Z

In 2013 Charlie Brooker imagined a machine built from a dead man's messages. He got the grief exactly right and the shop completely wrong.

https://nearfi.co/reviews/after-yang-20212026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Kogonada's gentle film about a broken android son is the least sensational AI story of its decade, and the first one that knew what the real heartbreak would be.

https://nearfi.co/essays/reality-reviewed-ai-agents2026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Science fiction promised us a someone. In November 2026 we have twelve very fast interns, a few of them excellent, and none of them should be left alone with the backups.

https://nearfi.co/essays/minority-report-was-wrong-about-the-crime2026-11-01T08:00:00Z

Spielberg's film thought prediction would be used to catch us. It turned out to be far more profitable to finish us.