29 Years Later, The 1990s Most Prophetic Quote Still Defines The 21st Century

Published Sep 4, 2026, 10:47 AM EDT Ambrose Tardive is an editor on ScreenRant's Comics team. Over the past two years, he has developed into the internet's foremost authority on The Far Side. Outside of his work for ScreenRant, Ambrose works as an Adjunct English Instructor. The 1990s was a time when sci-fi and reality were colliding in the form of the Internet, as the digital frontier that a generation of writers had speculated about finally came to fruition and became a worldwide phenomenon. As predicted, for better or worse, "cyberspace" quickly became a part of everyday life for an increasing number of people. That left one titan of American literature feeling uneasy. In the closing pages of his 1997 doorstopper Underworld, Don DeLillo summed up the signature anxiety of the 21st century into a single line. Nearly 30 years later, it is even more haunting and prophetic. Don DeLillo's work was drenched in anxiety about technology going all the way back to his 1971 debut novel Americana. DeLillo banged this drum especially loudly in his most well-known books, like 1985's White Noise, and '91's Mao II. Underworld was his follow-up to Mao II, the author's second and last book of the '90s. It was his biggest swing, his most blatant attempt to write the Great American Novel, if he hadn't already. The novel ends on a surreal note, and in the midst of a torrential final outpouring of prose, Don DeLillo spelled out the question of our time. In 1997, Don DeLillo Already Knew Separating Life From The Internet Was Going To Be A Problem "But she is in cyberspace, not heaven." The final 25 pages of Don DeLillo's Underworld, an 800+ page book, are devoted to Sister Alma Edgar, a nun who dies and transcends into a digital afterlife, where in a fugue-like passage typical of Don DeLillo, her digital identity merges with that of J. Edgar Hoover, the infamous FBI director who is a minor character in the novel going back to its prologue. Though Wikipedia wouldn't be founded for four more years, DeLillo essentially describes Sister Edgar as a "ghost in the Wiki," in this bit leading up to Underworld's culminating prophetic quote: Everything is connected. All human knowledge fathered and linked, hyperlinked, this site leading to that, this fact referenced to that, a keystroke, a mouse-click, a password – world without end, amen. The thing is, in the '90s, some writers might have treated this like a thing of beauty. DeLillo renders it as ominous. Looking back on Underworld's final stretch now, with the hegemony of digital life in mind, it is stunning how clearly he saw where the ball was going, so to speak. It might have been taken for granted, at the time of Underworld's release, that the Internet would change people's lives, but Don DeLillo warned just how reality-altering it would be. How the Internet, and the World Wide Web, would change how people interface with reality. DeLillo was ahead of the curve on that, which is why it hits so hard to go back and read the line: "Is cyberspace a thing within the world or is it the other way around?" Three decades later, at a time when so many people struggle to distinguish real life from digital footprint, it turns out to have been a chillingly prescient question. Don DeLillo's Question About The Internet And Reality Is More Relevant Than Ever Image credit: MovieStillsDB Think about it. Two years after Don DeLillo's Underworld came out, The Matrix became a massive cinematic success by dealing with this same cutting-edge version of a classical philosophical question. "Are you awake, or are you asleep and dreaming you're awake?" became "Are you terminally online and need to unplug to get back to real life?" The Matrix posed this question a generation early, and DeLillo prefigured it before that. What's slick about DeLillo's framing of it is that it takes its cue from another perennial debate in philosophy: is human perception "a thing in the world," or "is it the other way around?" Does perception create the world? For DeLillo, the Internet was a new form of perception, which meant a new reality. (A similar idea was the centerpiece of filmmaker David Cronenberg's body horror masterpiece Videodrome back in 1983.) DeLillo embodies that idea in Underworld's final sequence, where the Internet becomes the afterlife. Or more accurately, a bardo, a space between life and death where restless souls are trapped. But he also puts it in plain language, asking "which contains the other," cyberspace or the world, "and how can you tell for sure?" Underworld didn't win the Pulitzer Prize for the year it came out. It lost to Phillip Roth's American Pastoral. Roth's novel is likewise big and ambitious, and essential American fiction, and it is a great example of literature's capacity to look backward and survey how things got to be the way they are. But in Underworld's closing moments, when Don DeLillo goes full-on sci-fi, it is a testament to fiction's ability to achieve a shockingly clear view of the future. What do you think of Don DeLillo's question, "Is cyberspace a thing within the world or is it the other way around?"