The basic plot of the book was the birth of a planetary overmind through the means of a mini black hole.
However, there was a subplot about, yes, a bunch of kids who befriended an old man then got pissed when they found out the old man was recording their meetings in an attempt to show the world how bad the kids are nowadays. So it wasn’t the old guy who was screwed over, it was the kids. One of the kids felt so betrayed that he, by himself, challenged an entire gang to a fight, thereby committing suicide.
The old “Rollerball” (with James Caan and not with that simping pantywaist from American Pie) was pretty prescient. Beyond having characters watching movies at home (VHS & Beta were barely started, if at all, during filming), I’d argue that it predicts the obscene level of violence and greed in professional American football.
“Demolition Man” has a kind of meta-action-movie moment predicting Arnold Schwarzenegger’s entrance into politics and an eerie convict name in the cryoprison (Scott Peterson).
Getting off the topic of movies, how about “The Jetsons?” I’ve seen things on that show, circa 1962, that were unimaginable then, but in pretty common usage now.
[ul]
[li]Instead of reading a newspaper actually made of paper, George used a screen in his living room to view the paper online. This was about 5 years before the actual existence of the internet and 30 years before the first web browser came into existence.[/li]
[li]A classmate of Elroy got into trouble for watching “The Flinstones” on a wristwatch sized TV. Granted, the Jetsons didn’t even originate this one. Dick Tracy used a two-way wrist TV. But a an actual TV you can wear on a wrist exists today and is already obsolete because it is analog.[/li]
[li]Goerge had to go to his doctor to take a physical. His doctor had him swallow a pill with a camera and a radio transmitter in it. As the pill passed through George’s system, the doctor viewed the information from the transmitter on a screen. Such technology is in use today.[/li]
I freely admit the producers of the Jetsons probably borrowed these concepts from elsewhere, but it is where I first saw them. Whoever came up with these concepts was right on the money for predicting these things for the 21st century.
[/ul]
Well, there was this 1966 filmstrip that was making the rounds awhile back that was somewhat eerily prophetic—albeit in kind of an “ancient or postapocalyptic scribe getting a glimpse of something totally beyond his comprehension and struggling to describe and contextualize it in closest way his primitive intellect can manage” sorta way.
Not originally a movie, but futuristic comic Dick Tracy had a wrist radio not unlike modern cellphones. It even had little lightning bolts shooting out of it. Wish mine did that.
The Running Man is by far my favorite Schwarzenegger movie because it’s a 1980s time capsule (spandex, big hair) that IMHO was quite prescient about at least one aspect of the future – reality television.
Wow, Ranchoth, that strip is pretty impressive. They were pretty far off on the technology itself, but spot-on on the applications of the technology.
At least, in so far as they show… I wonder if the brains behind that film contemplated internet porn (of course, they couldn’t have said so even if they had).
There wasa film made about the 1936 NY World’s Fair (the “World of Tomorrow”?). Of course, it was a semi-documentary. But I was amazed by how accurat its predictions came to be-like the General Moto’s City of Tomorrow-quite accurate.
Well, the film was based on an earlier Stephen King story. Many people felt that it was based, consciously or not, on Robert Sheckley’s 1950s short story The Prize of Peril, which had been filmed twice – in 1970 and 1983 – long before The Running Man. So it was prescient, but it was easily beaten in the prescience derby.
They were already in use in 1984. I remember noticing the laptop computer in the movie, and also knowing that they were already available (though presumably one in the far-off year of 2010 would be way more powerful than what was available in 1984). So I think that was a commercially-available product, not a prop created for the movie.
“What the wife selects on her console the husband will pay for on his counterpart console”. :rolleyes: So far only technology has been mentioned; what social stuff did anybody get right? For example I remember reading a future speculation book from the 70s (sorry can’t think of the title) in my HS library that predicted all kinds of weird thinks. Most of it was a biography of a girl named Milleny (sp?) born in 2000. She only had one name because after 30 yrs of women keeping there own names surnames like Smith-Doe-Miller-Cooper stated becoming common and the law was changed so that people only need one name as long as it was distinctive. There was alot of stuff about group living, open marriages, polyamory, becoming mainstream (by this decade), but nothing about same-sex marriage.
I think that the social stuff is far more interesting. Fred Pohl, for instance, had a collection of stories published as The Years of the City which showed how people lived at various times. He showed social changes, laws, and politics. I particularly loved the notion that people could work for the government for a time, and have that count as their tax obligation or instead of serving time in jail. The system wasn’t perfect, but it worked. The last story was written in a futuristic language which had most sex and gender references removed, and I thought it worked well.
Someone once said that almost anyone could have predicted the automobile before it was invented, and maybe could have predicted drive-in theaters as a logical extension of the car. However, it would take a really gifted author to predict the drive-in theater as the social gathering place it became, and how they became known as passion pits for teens.
I think that list is pretty lame. 12 Monkeys is in the list because there wasn’t actually a civilization destroying outbreak in 1996? Sure, it is a light and fluffy piece, but what is the point of saying that? Why not complain about any fictional story: “Oh, that romantic comedy ‘predicted’ John Smith and Jane Doe would fall in love after some comical missteps, but I found it so inaccurate: in real life those people did not exist”.
It isn’t quite what was asked for, since it is set in what is still the future, and the specific set of events are unlikely anyway, but I really enjoyed the depiction of future technology in Children of Men. I found the technology extremely believable, both from a technological point of view, but also from an economical and social point of view. Few movies get that to feel right. The movie is set a few decades from now in a very gloomy future, and the transition from today’s technology seems very believable: flat panel displays everywhere (on rickshaws, sides of buses, etc) as advertisements due to the technology getting really cheap and flexible, subtle projection displays in the car, etc. It felt right for technological development in a world that most likely has a horribly shrinking economy, almost as if all that was left was some momentum from today, but otherwise mostly people had given up.
It may turn out to be horribly wrong, but it sure felt as if they had thought about how the technology would fit into the world, and even if things are possible would they really catch on, etc.
Another example I’ve seen is that anyone, on seeing the telephone, could have predicted the pocket phone, but it took someone like Heinlein to realize that people would regard the pocket phones as an inconvenience, and deliberately keep them turned off or not take them with them.
And I am getting old