You’re reading a novel/watching a film and suddenly you think, “How could anyone have thought that would happen?”
or “creepy, thats exactly as it is today.”
I can’t think of many good ones but a brave attempt at future currency features in a Phillip K Dick novel, if memory will serve me correctly for once it was “The three stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.” Money in the future will apparently not be a cashless, computerised system but “truffle skins,” used because they are the only thing that cannot be reproduced exactly, which sounds kinda cool actually.
So what is your best/worst prediction from the SF genre?
Best Prediction: From Spaceballs. Someday, pizzas will be notorious crime lords.
Worst Prediction: From Star Trek (in general): In the future, humans won’t be able to create new music or artwork, and will have to rely on all the famous works of Beethoven, Bach, and all other music created prior to the 21st century.
SF doesn’t have such a great track record when it comes to predictions, but…
Arthur C. Clarke and communications satellites.
Cleve Cartmill’s famous interview with the FBI after his description of an atomic bomb in 1944 proved a bit too close to the truth… don’t remember the name of the story…
Murray Leinster’s “A Logic Named Joe” apparently predicts a network of information-access devices which gets out of hand by allowing people to get hold of too much information the powers that be want to keep quiet… sound familiar?
The framing story around Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot collection describes a reporter taking notes using something that sounds uncannily like the five-finger Miniscribe system that was around some years ago.
And there was that episode of Space: 1999 which showed Joan Collins resorting to radical surgical procedures to keep her looks…
Probably the best job of SF prediction was in “The Golden Kazoo” by John Schneider, which predicted in 1959 that politicians would be marketed like consumer products and would base their positions entirely on what the opinion polls said.
Worst? There was an Isaac Asimov story that predicted we’d never be able to climb Mt. Everest because the aliens living there would prevent it. The story was published six months after Hillary and Norkay reached the top.
Among the best was Jules Verne in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. He predicted, among other things, nuclear submarines, television and the aqualung.
Among the worst are all those writers in all those stories who said the Great Wall of China would be visible from space. I hear it’s not.
His “lost” work Paris in the Twentieth Century predicted the fax, or at least posited the existence of a rapid transmission system for printed documents. He also described the education system as one geared more towards practical business skills and less on the arts and sciences, insofar as they didn’t touch upon marketable skills.
IIRC, Arthur C. Clarke always makes sure the equipment used in his stories has some basis in fact. I wouldn’t be at all surpirsed if the water-powered spaceship in 3001 eventually comes into existance.
Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues” did not predict the nuclear sub or televisions.
Jules Verne did predict the television (which he called the “telephote”), but it was in Carpathian Castle and in **Diary of an Amercian Journalist in the Year ____[/b} (I forget the year). In the Disney version of “20,000 leagues” they made the Nautilus a nuclear sub (just like the real one the U.S. Navy launched about the same time), but that was their own invention – it’s not in Verne’s book.
As I’ve pointed out in previous threads, Verne really was ahead of his time. He had the first Call fror Help by Radio (** The Barsac Mission/City in the Sahara**), the use of rubber survival suits ** Tribulations of a Chinaman**), Use of composite materials for great strength/light weight in flying machines (** Robur the Conqueror**), and even Tractor Beams (The Hunt for the Meteor)!
My current vote for most prescient is “A Logic Named Joe”, which Steve Wright notes above and I have cited many times on the SDMB. It’s probably Murray Leinster’s second most anthologized story (after “First Contact”), and it is uncannily accurate in predicting the Internet – right down to kids downloading porn after the censorship circuits go down.
[ul]
[li]Where’s the Pan Am space shuttle? (The one we currently have doesn’t count)[/li][li]Where’s the cool space station with centrifugal gravity?[/li][li]Where’s Opal?[/li][li]Where’s the moon colony?[/li][li]Where’s the manned Jupiter mission?[/li][li]Where’s HAL9000?[/li][/ul]
“pocket electronic sliderules” are available, my dad has a program for his palmpilot that allows you to manipulate a small graphical sliderule. coool
The best for me is 1984 by Orwell (of course). Just reading it makes me feel creeped out. It’s not so much the techological advances, but how things are run and how society works.
You know, this really isn’t a prediction of the future per se, and it hasn’t come to pass, but I think it WILL.
Star Wars: They predicted the development of gay, gold robots.
Been hearing about this writer called Vernor Vinge? Anyone heard of him?
He is credited by some as the man who first thought of/predicted the internet as he depicted his alien species using a computer network to communicate
He recently published an article for the NASA institute about a singularity concerning computers and technology the essay of which can be found at this link:
http://www.student.nada.kth.se/~nv91-asa/Trans/vinge
Intersting if not mindblowing…
He’s not published much, and I want to find out more about him, so if anyone’s got any knowledge/info…? 
Best:
Check out Robert Heinlein’s “Between Planets” and “Space Cadet.” Both books have characters casually using what we would call a cell phone today. Both books from sometime in the fifties. I am at work right now, so I can’t check the copyright dates.
Worst:
Same author, same books plus the short story “The Roads Must Roll.” Immense moving walkways in cities and connecting cities. What lunacy. Worse than train tracks.
Heinlein wasn’t the only one to write about the moving sidewalks. Asimov used them in The Caves of Steel, and I’m pretty sure others used them as well – no doubt fallout from some popularization of the time.
Heinlein predicted systems that turned out room lights when people left the room, and tirned them on when they entered.
Edward Everett Hale predicted the first artificial satellite, used for navigational purposes, back around the time of the Civil War. His story was called “The Brick Moon” because it was made of ceramic material to avoid problems with atmospheric friction (just like the Space Shuttle Tiles). In the sequel he puts a crew of people aboard the Brick Moon.
Heinlein wrote about a President whose wife was strongly influenced in her decisions by her private astrologer in Stranger in a Strange Land. I understand the book was popular in the closing days of the Reagan presidency in Washington. He also gave us “President Ford” in Methuselah’s Children. Fredric Brown gave us a story about an aging astronaut returning to space circa 1999 in The Lights in the Sky are Stars (written in the early 1950s). These aren’t good “predictions”, but they’re interesting synchronicities.
H.G. Wells wrote about tanks long before their invention in “The Land Ironclads”, about “the atomic bomb” (which he named) in The World Set Free (and which the real inventor of the atomic bomb, Leo Szilard, gave as inspiration, and for showing him the political implications), and about the devastating effects of aerial warfare long before the fact in The War in the Air.
But even Orwell himself wrote a short followup to 1984 wherein he notes that many of his predictions were not going to come about, especially the society of Big Brother. He said, IIRC, that he had really made a serious underestimation of the strength of nationalism across the World.
Murray Leinster’s “A Logic Named Joe” (1946) is a damned good guess about the internet: everyone has terminals (“Logics”) in their home that connect to interconnected central servers, and everything from encyclopedia articles to “adult” entertainment can be found. He even has sort-of sear cPolice/hospital/court records are all stored there too.
The premise of the story is that one of the terminals becomes sentient and allows any terminal to start correlating data so you can get a meaningful, original answer that works to any question (“How can I get rich fast?”). It also breaks through security and’ll answer any personal question that would otherwise be encrypted/blocked (“Which people in my apartment have been arrested?”)
It’s a fun story and surprisingly prophetic
Fenris