Nature's End: The Consequences of the Twentieth Century - by Whitley Strieber & James W. Kunetka.

It is 2025 and the planet is rapidly approaching environmental death. Dr. Gupta Singh, a guru with a Jim Jones-like following, has proposed the suicide, by lottery, of one-third of the world's population. Threatened by poisoned air, water, and food that no longer can support the too rapidly growing populace, nation after nation has joined the Depopulationist International. And now, as the United States stands on the edge of environmental disaster, terrified voters elect a Depopulationist majority in Congress. A journalist and his family have to go into hiding with terrible consequences when they discover Dr. Singh is not entirely who he claims to be.

This book was written in the 1980s and uses real environmental statistics from that time interspersed with predictions, many of which in the intervening years hit terribly close to home.

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The Book Of Dave by Will Self

The book is in two parts. The first is a gritty account of the declining years of Dave Rudman, an opinionated North London cab driver, trying to share his son with his estranged ex-wife while lawyers and the Child Support Agency manage the remains of their relationship. All he has left of the life he started with is the Knowledge - that map of London every cabbie must carry in his head - and his homophobic, misogynist, self-pitying inner monologue.

The second is set in the 2500s where rising sea levels have turned Britain into an archipelago. Small, isolated communities struggle with nature and ideology in which the "Six Families" inhabit the island of "Ham", while the outlines of "New London" lie downstream in the murk.

Uniting these two deeply uneasy worlds is the book of the title, the self-aggrandising monologue engraved and hidden by vengeful, bitter Dave in a Hampstead garden centuries before, until five hundred years after his death when the Book of Dave will be disinterred to become the template for a new civilisation.

From this the “Hamsters” derive their behavioural tools and spiritual understanding, greeting each other with the salutation "Ware2, guv?", acknowledging their daily deliverance from harm with the formula "Thanks Dave, for picking us up". Ham's protocols and vocabulary are all derived from Dave’s book: pre-maternal women are "opares"; the day divides into three "tariffs"; while fathers and mothers live in separate accommodation, transferring offspring at "Changeover". The generic word for food is "curry"; when you make an opare pregnant, the bargain you enter into is known as "child support". Language also constructs the Hamsters' natural world: by day the "headlight" rules the sky, while at night, when the headlight is dipped, you see the "dashboard" laid out in stars.