One could also say that all of Gibson and Sterling's early novels were warnings, describing in some detail near future cyberpunk dystopias.

When reading Neuromancer and Count Zero, the cumulative sum of the evocative description of "the sprawl" and the post war environment led me to form a fairly bleak mental picture of the place. And floating above all that an ultra elite class of the 1% of the 1% (sensenet stars, the tessier-ashpools, etc).

Islands in the Net also paints a picture of radically even more unequal wealth distribution, coupled with massive economic disruptions and civil wars in developing nations.