I’m thinking about literature or film that was set in the future compared to when it was produced. Like 2001 written in 1968. Or 1984 written in 1949. Which such works held up the best once that future date had actually come and gone?
Right now, I’m reading Vonnegut’s Player Piano, written in 1952. So far, the word I’m thinking of most often is “quaint.” The author describes technological changes which are far short of what is now commonplace, and the culture it describes seems like 1950s suburbia.
Other works seem to overshoot the mark, like 2001, promising technological advances that remain way beyond us.
I’m not solely talking about authors who accurately predicted specific technology or social/political developments. Tho it IS somewhat jarring to read/watch about any futuristic society without cellphones… But I’m eager to hear of authors/producers who reasonably portrayed versions of the future which have proven to be not completely unbelievable.
IIRC, Winston Smith isn’t even sure if it is 1984 - it’s just a guess since he was born in the aftermath of WWII and he’s about forty. It could easily be any year the Party decides it wants it to be.
I think evaluating 1984 for its scientific and technological accuracy is completely missing the point. Orwell could have as easily called the book 1584 and the Ministry of Truth could be a Star Chamber court.
1984 obviously did not come to pass because there was not an atomic war in the early 1950s that resulted in the destruction of liberal democracy. On the other hand the concept of verifiable objective truth has been taking a beating in recent years.
The thing I remember the most clearly from the assorted comments about the book 1984 in the year 1984 was the person (I wish I remember who) who wrote that Orwell had posited a world in which everyone had a television which watched them and told them what to do; and in the actual 1984 almost everyone had a television which they watched, and it told them (in somewhat less obvious ways) what to do. And that there might not be as much difference between the two as we were congratulating ourselves on.
Since most of the people who read 1984 are middle class and because the protagonist of the novel is what passes for middle class (the Outer Party) in that world, I think most readers take away a mistaken impression. We’re repeatedly told that the vast majority of the population are proles- uneducated workers who live in shanty towns and perform manual labor for the barest pittance of survival. The proles are mostly beneath political notice; they aren’t subject to the discipline of the Inner and Outer Parties and often don’t even have telescreens in their homes. In other words, most people there don’t share Winston Smith’s experiences; it’s as if 80% of the population were ghetto dweller day laborers or derelicts living in homeless encampments. By percentages anyway most people would not be under the strict scrutiny of the Thought Police- proles and animals are free.
I think one of the best examples of predicting a plausible future was Max Headroom, which was a bit more dystopian than where we’re likely to end up, but the technology it presented was not far off what we have recently developed with AI, the Internet, and authentic digital hosts.
Are you asking specifically about 1984? You know it’s about Stalinism and totalitarianism and so forth, right? I don’t think Orwell was trying to predict exactly how many flat-screen TVs and IBM PCs and mobile phones would be out by 1984. It’s not even about future totalitarianism: like most science fiction, it was about the present.
Sorry for the apparent confusion. No, I am NOT asking specifially about 1984. As I said, I thought about this thread as I am reaing Player Piano. I just thought 1984 made for an amusing title.
It would take a long time to analyze all the works set in a future date (when the book was published) and determine which underestimate the amount of change and which overestimate the amount of change and which get the amount approximately correct. In any case, correctly estimating the amount of change isn’t really what such books are about. Partly, reading a lot of them can give you information about many of the things that might happen. Partly, many of them are really about things that are currently happening at the time they are written.
True. (Though I’m not sure that they’re “free” exactly; free from the strict supervision, but not free of living in awful conditions, working terrible jobs, and being turned into cannon fodder.) However, I don’t think that much changes the point – other than possibly to point out that even more people were/are affected by the actual version.
ETA:
Also true. And dystopias in particular are warning stories; they’re about ‘if we keep going this way, this might happen. So let’s not go there!’
A difference between reality and the prediction is exactly what they’re trying to bring about.
I’m not sure the goal of any Science Fiction writer is to accurately predict the future. Would reading a book in 1973 about things that actually happened in 2023 really be all that interesting without aliens, robot assassins, or nuclear holocaust?
For sheer predictive accuracy, you would do better to look at the one panel cartoons of Arthur Radebaugh.
Instead of having a device forced on you which watches and listens to your every move, now people willing pay for a device that watches and listens to your every move, and they anthropomorphize it and give it a cutsie name.
2001 has been mentioned. Not only don’t we have giant space stations and nukular ships than can travel between planets, we don’t even have Pan Am!
But Blade Runner was an oddly-specific prediction. “Off world colonies” , machines that are more human than human, a wet Los Angeles, all prior to 2017? The movie didn’t even need to specify a date.
Since lots of people read books in any given year that are set in that year, or in previous years, in fields other than science fiction that contain no aliens, robot assassins, or nuclear holocausts (and sometimes containing no assassins at all): I can only conclude that yes, it might well be.
And there is science fiction of that sort, or at least used to be: utopias or dystopias or alternate-worlds that are just humans trying to cope with imagined different circumstances.
For what bit’s worth, the version of 1984 starring John Hurt (who looks amazingly like George Orwell – which is certainly intentional) was actually filmed in London in the year 1984, and in the months the novel takes place, much of it in places that weren’t sets. So London in the year 1984 could pass for the world of 1984
