Fictional dystopias by writers from Herman Melville to Philip Roth seem to have had the measure of the new US president many years ahead of time

Reality may be stranger than fiction, but fiction has managed to predict some of the strangest turns of our “post-fact” age. In the week that Donald Trump was inaugurated as the president of the US, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here was republished – the plot of which resonates with the rise of Trump.

With eerie prescience, Lewis told the story of Buzz Windrip – demagogue, chancer and political conman of the highest order – who travels from the margins of politics to be swept to power by popular vote.

The 1935 novel that predicted the rise of Donald Trump Read more

But though Lewis’s main character bears the most obvious resemblance to Trump, his novel is not the only dystopian fiction to predict the awkward political realities of 2017. Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle imagines an alternative America in which Germany won the second world war – a cautionary tale about the dangers of complacency in the face of fascism that also feels uncomfortably relevant.

More recent but no less prescient is Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America. A close second to Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here in the literary canon foretelling the rise of Trump, Roth’s novel upends history so that multimillionaire aviator Charles Lindbergh beats Franklin D Roosevelt in the race to the White House. Lindbergh is portrayed, like Trump, as an admirer of brutal foreign dictators. He is also suspected of being blackmailed by a foreign power, Nazi Germany, that has meddled in the presidential election – allegations that might sound familiar.

But in the latest issue of the New Yorker, Roth denied Lindbergh was a prototype for new president, for whom he had only harsh words. “Trump is just a con artist,” he told the magazine by email. Instead, the writer often proclaimed the US’s greatest living novelist pointed to a 150-year-old classic: Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man.

Described by Roth as a “darkly pessimistic, daringly inventive novel”, Melville’s final novel “could just as well have been called The Art of the Scam”. Melville writes of a group of passengers travelling by steamboat along the Mississippi and their encounters with a mysterious conman. Published on 1 April 1857, the day on which the book is set, the book begs the question “what do you trust?” – a message Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer may be contemplating before his next bruising encounter with the media.

Stuart Kelly, author of The Book of Lost Books, said that rather than turning to the obvious literary dystopias such as George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to discover how a reality TV star became the leader of the free world, readers should rifle through back issues of 2000AD, especially John Wagner’s Judge Dredd strips. “I’m particularly fond of the satirical sections … the criminalisation of sugar, competitive ugliness competitions.”

The populace in Judge Dredd lives in thrall to whatever craze is just taking off, filling their leisure time watching reality TV shows to relish in their exploitation and ridicule of contestants.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The last president of the United States ... Judge Dredd. Illustration: 2000AD and Rebellion

For those looking for a read with fewer pictures, Edward Bellamy’s 1888 classic Looking Backward is often cited as a futuristic novel that predicted the contemporary age. As well as debit cards and telephone cables to distribute entertainment into the home, Looking Backward features a prototype internet.

But as Kelly pointed out, Bellamy gets as much wrong as he gets right: his US is a co-operative socialist utopia, with a functioning welfare system and Finnish-style “basic income”. It is a long way from a world in which Obamacare is being dismantled.

Bellamy’s faults raise the chief problem with dystopian fiction: it often gets as much wrong as it gets right. Search all day in a library and you are bound to find a book that, whether utopia or dystopia, matches present reality with uncanny clarity. But like religious texts, the ability of fiction to predict the future is as much about modern readers’ interpretations as the intention of the writer, as Jess Harrison, Sinclair Lewis’s editor at Penguin Classics, points out.

Citing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and MP Shiel’s The Purple Cloud as examples of books as relevant to our age as they were to their initial readers, Harrison says: “These books are classics because they can bear multiple rereadings, and somehow always speak to the present in new ways.”

EM Forster’s short story The Machine Stops is a case in point. Set in a future where humanity has been forced to live underground, a giant machine provides for all needs, and, though travel is permitted, few undertake it because everything one needs can be brought to the door.

In what could be interpreted as a proto-social media, communication is led through messaging and video conferencing, and the only activity is the sharing of ideas and knowledge. In the story, the collapse of the Machine brings the collapse of civilisation and, along with it, the revelation that humankind needs nature more than technology. As conceived, the story was a quaint critique of industrialisation; read with modern eyes, Forster seems to predict our dependence on the internet.

Only in one case does a character’s voice ring through the decades with the same message intended by his creators. That character is Nigel Molesworth, the hero of Down With Skool and Lewis’s stablemate at Penguin Classics. His insight from 1950s boarding school St Custard’s is as relevant today as it was when first uttered. “Every skool hav a resident buly who is fat and roll about the place clouting everybode,” noted the schoolboy creation of Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle. And who, looking at the news reports, would not cry with Nigel’s brother Molesworth 2: “Reality is so unspeakably sordid it make me shudder.”