Off the top of my head, none predicted cell phones and the internet. Most focused on rocket cars and video phones. Look at Jules Verne, he wrote about the traveling under the sea and around the globe, and that happened, but no one ever wrote about a phone you could carry with you. What else did they miss the mark on?
SSG Schwartz
There was somebody who wrote about a network of video terminals connected. I remember reading about him. He’s usually touted as predicting the Internet. I’ll see if I can find his name.
Dick Tracy had a two way wrist radio (basically a phone) a long time before cellphones. So did Maxwell Smart.
I believe Murray Leinster had a story involving something like the internet. EM Forster, in The Machine Stop had everyone networked together, without direct contact with each other.
Very few people predicted laptops. There were intelligent PDAs, but not laptops. And I don’t recall anyone predicting that the first footsteps on the moon would be televised.
You’ll never get a good answer to this question because there is no consensus as to how close a prediction has to be in order to qualify for getting it right. People pull out what are to me the most amazing generalities and call them correct predictions. Yet, I’ve also read good articles that cite stories that made very accurate predictions of things that people say were never mentioned.
To me it doesn’t matter much. SF is always about the present and not the future. The future is just a game put in to make it fun. Predictions are a side issue. Not one sf story in a hundred is written to make predictions about what’s going to happen.
Radio communications were fairly well invented as early as the telephone itself. Tesla gave demonstrations, I believe. Cellphones didn’t need to be predicted because the only thing stopping people from having it was getting the devices small enough and then tying it in to the telephony system.
But true, they were never shown to be the big thing they are. But I’d imagine that that’s because Science Fiction does better if it only concerns itself with a few individual technologies–otherwise they would have to be explaining things every other paragraph. And for something that’s fairly well guaranteed to come eventually, there just isn’t much use in spending time on it.
I don’t recall anyone who predicted we would essentially abandon space exploration.
I don’t recall anyone who predicted the sudden and peaceful breakup of the Soviet Union.
On a more trivial note, I don’t recall anyone who predicted movie rentals. I can think of early predictions of movies being played at home but I don’t remember anyone predicting a business based on the idea of going out and renting a movie to watch at home.
Aren’t Star Trek communicators really close to current cell phones. You tap a button, you say you want to talk to and then the person’s communicator on the other end beeps.
Sounds just a cell phone with voice recognition to me.
Reading the OP reminded me of a story I wrote in the late 70s which had the main character checking his mail and then entering the bills into some sort of electronic system which would automatically pay them directly out of his “credit account”. Yesterday I did pretty much the same thing in real life.
Was I predicting the future? I don’t think so, it just seemed to me to be a logically futuristic way of paying bills, which I threw in to help establish the setting of the story. (Which took place at the Milwaukee campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago; so much for my predictive abilities.)
Thanks to a previous thread on this board, I became aware of the notoriously corny John Jones’s Dollar by Harry Stephen Keeler from 1914:
Funny how real-world tech warped on by Trek communicator tech like it was standing still. There are some cell phones on the market which aren’t any bigger than TNG-style com badges-frankly in 3-400 years I’d expect wireless communication to involve tiny implants in the outer ear, unnoticeable by villians who would otherwise take your communicators away.
Cell phones (though not the actual name) are “predicted” in Robert Heinlein’s 1948 Space Cadet, complete with the issues of potentially embarassing conversations in public places and the problem of always being available–a juvenile (college age) character comments that he packed his phone in his bag to keep his parents from being able to reach him.
Of course Venus, the first manned expedition to which was in 1971 (although none of the crew thereof survived), has swamps and intelligent natives, etc.
Which is why I say that sf is always about the present.
Not only do the writers have trouble imaging what things will be like in the far future, but they also have the issue of making them interesting to the audience.
A true far future tech book or tv show would have everything happen as if by magic. But how interesting would that be? Far better to take what people know and understand in the present and give it a twist to make it different and “future-y.” Unnoticeable implants aren’t very visible. Cool communicators tell a story without having to give exposition. Villains taking them away is story. Villains setting up interference in the gigagig band to disrupt a broadcast is a snoozefest.
It’s always about telling the story. Making realistic predictions usually gets in the way.
I remember someone saying that SF predicted landing on the moon and that SF predicted TV. But no one predicted that the world would be watching someone land on the moon on TV. I don’t know if that is accurate.
Isaac Asimov wrote several short stories about a global network of computers, which he called “Multivac,” which at least initially seems an awful lot like the internet. (In Asimov’s stories, a intelligent entity emerges from the huge number of nodes and connections.) But you have a network, and individual terminals which interface with it. Internet.
In terms of technology, I don’t think you’re going to find anything that wasn’t thought of by some writer. Wall-size flat panel TVs? Rad Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Etc.
The biggest thing sci-fi writers consistently failed to predict, I agree, was the demise of the Soviet Union.
Robert Heinlein predicted something like the internet in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and For Us the Living (a horrid book, IMHO). In some of his works, discussing “The Crazy Years” (Revolt in 2100 and a short story which takes place on Venus that I can’t recall the title of), he makes mention that spaceflight is abandoned for a number of years.
In the novelization of Star Trek: The Motion[del]less[/del] Picture, Kirk has an implant in which the scenes of V’ger wiping out the Klingon ships are transmitted to him.
The Leinster “internet” story from 1945 is called “A Logic Named Joe.”
Sir Rhosis
As far as I can tell, SF usually posits future humanity as becoming more enlightened as a result of their information systems - I can’t recall any that predicted dumb things like conspiracy theories getting a free ride on the same systems.
I haven’t really read any science fiction but did anyone predict that terrorism would become such a big problem? That the most powerful nation in the world would be battling ragged insurgents and saboteurs rather than an equally-matched, powerful army of evil or something?
Orson Scott Card predicted the internet, and influential bloggers, even, in Ender’s Game.
Astronauts speechifing upon landing on the moon.