IIRC Douglas Adams coined the term and it’s basically a synonym for “Retro-Futuristic”…
Speculative fiction attepts to predict the future somewhat. Speculative fiction that ends up being wrong is just “wrong speculative fiction”.
I really think you guys are overreaching a bit. A certain type of science fiction writer does try to predict the future, just not to the extent that most people think. They just come up with a few concepts that they think would make sense to happen in the future, and then explore implications. Still you are right in that said framework is mostly used to explore modern day problems.
A mainstream example I can think of is Star Trek: The Next Generation. Roddenberry went all out trying to imagine what society would be like after humans met aliens, moved past scarcity, and started exploring the stars. This is particularly obvious when you look at its predecessor, which was much more about the culture of the day, even being touted as the then-normal form of television (a western), just set in space.
Oh come now.
No one has complained to me about Mars’ atmosphere in my Steampunk stories. Remember, the lowlands, on the dead sea bottoms, have an almost comfortable air pressure. You only need a respirator if you go to the highlands, but that is where the atmosphere plants are most likely to be attacked by the squids…
I’ve mentioned this before but who cares…
“Inventing” the cell phone (Heinlein called it a “pocketphone”, but the description exactly matches the modern cell phone), isn’t the big deal. As noted above, a lot of the correctly predicted technology is either simple extrapolation or lucky guesses.
No, the impressive thing that Heinlein did was to predict that having a cell phone on you at all times would become a massive pain in the ass, and in two separate stories he has his character leave the phone behind, because he wanted a little peace and quiet.
To predict the technology was easy. To correctly predict the sociological implications was genius!
The way I heard it was that it was trivial to predict the automobile, but it would have been genius to predict the traffic jam.
When I first looked at the thread yesterday I contemplated mentioning ‘Zeerust’, similar to Kobal2’s post, but decided not to because, as you mention, it’s generally a synonym for ‘retro-futuristic’ and tends to involve the concept of deliberately invoking the past with futuristic trappings. Fellow gamers will note that the most perfect contemporary example is probably seen in the Fallout computer games where we see a post-apocalyptic wasteland envisioned by way of the 1950’s.
However I think it bears noting that common usage has spread somewhat beyond that basic idea to include ‘serious’ futurism with outdated ideas. TVtropes page on the term even includes examples from Heinlein and Asimov contrasting their futuristic societies with dated assumptions. We’ve attained interstellar travel but scientists still use slide rules for instance. And, as someone who works in the dying newspaper industry, I find it amusing that Asimov states that hardcopy news will still exist by the time Foundation rolls around. If I’m still doing my same job ten years from now I’ll be shocked.
“Retro-Futuristic” was the terms initial meaning, but I think it’s grown substantially beyond that. Take a look at some of the examples under ‘literature’, you may be surprised.
The way I heard it was that it was easy to predict the automobile, and a bit more difficult to predict drive in movies…and genius to predict that the drive in theaters would become famous as passion pits.
OG I feel old now.
The origin of the word is actually mentioned right there on the TV Tropes page:
Yup, but I haven’t read that book, so I must’ve picked up somewhere else. And since I don’t read Sci Fi mags or book critics either…shrug One of the great mysteries of our time, I’m sure.
That’s a line from Asimov.
Though it might not be such a surprising development to people who experienced the traffic jams caused by horse-drawn carts.
ETA: Although I’m guessing there weren’t as many of them and they probably weren’t as big.
There were no twenty-mile backups on freeways such as those I’ve seen in California, but every decent history of the era will give graphic descriptions of the impassibility of downtown city streets.
Maybe there will be flying cars… but I believe he, as a writer, was immediately informed by the Mag-lev breakthroughs of the 60’s and 70’s, with bullet trains and monorails, and such. Logically, anti-grav would come after, and in a way, didn’t he predict the future of “flying cars” with the 1988 Breakthroughs in High Temp Superconductivity. It’s an archetype of gravitational control.
In what universe does “logically” make sense in these sentences? 
It may not be apparent, but magnetism and gravity are linked. I believe we fail to notice it- the missing link- only because we can only readily observe it with limited senses on a macro-homonid-level. But we wil llearn more about gravity since we’ve amped it up with nearly perfect giant superconducting circles underground.
Wel, llogicallly, as our wil llessens, we shal llearn to llevitate as al lleaping lllamas lluckilly llaunch the Dailli LLama and LLorenzo LLamas…
Oh, lluck it.
What?
retroactive anachronism
Robert Bloch was at an SF convention where the hoary old topic of SF future prediction was discussed in a panel or talk or whatever. After a while he couldn’t contain himself, stood up and roared: “I don’t write to predict the future, I write to prevent it!”.