I think The Future Should Have Flying Cars (TFSHFC) would be a good name for what the OP is asking actually.
If not wanted for purpose, then I’ll use it as a bandname.
It sounds like it should be a TVTropes entry, actually. 
I read that Heinlein was the only syfy 
writer to “predict” that the moon landing would be televised
Boy, you go away to a Science Fiction convention and you find a whole bunch of threads on SciFi that you’re too late to contribute to meaningfully.
I have to agree with much of what is said here. Science Fiction writers aren’t gods, after all, who can flawlessly foresee the future. They’re people who like to extrapolate from current technology, or who imagine exotic settings unavailable otherwise, or want to tell political allegory without repercussions, or are craftsmen who need to crank out stories for the wherewithal to put bread on the table, or they’re visionaries who want to pout their vision before the world. Or they’re combinations of some of these and other things besides. The point is, they’re fallible human beings trying to write about things happening in the future that they may or may not believe to be probable. (Or they may not even care). So it’s unfair to seize on several of these, lump them together as if they’re a homogenous whole, and fault them for not being perfectly accurate.
Sometimes these are the work of people who think they’re got a shot at accurately predicting at least a possible future. It’s hard for me to read the works of engineers like George O. Smith or Raymond F. Jones (gee, I wonder who he is) and not see in them pipedreams where they extrapolate a future based on what they know, putting in likely touches (especially the non-obvious or colorful ones) and seeing that alone as justification enough for the story, without any need for deep insight into the Human Condition. So Smith’s Venus Equilateral stories are wonderful little glimpses of a future that never was, but which looks perfectly plausible and believable – given the knowledge at the time. Smith’s Venus-Trojan Point communications satellite uses vacuum tube technology and utterly lacks computers even of the vacuum-tube variety. They use three-dimensional cams for orbital control (as Heinlein does in Rocket Ship Galileo). The teleportation device they build obviously depends upon proper synchronization of signals (at least in its original incarnation, where a glass cube comes out more like a helix) than in storing and reconstituting data, as would be done in a more recent story. (Smith tried to belatedly rescue the series when he wrote a new story for the collected series in the 1970s, incorporating solid-state devices, but it seems jarringly out of place) Even though it’s set in the future, technology has already passed it by. But it’s not Smith’s fault that his crystal ball was cracked.
Similarly, I’m frequently awed by Jules Verne’s extrapolative skill (the guy was trained as a lawyer and had a career as a stage librettist before taking up his scientific romances) His Nautilus in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea , written when men were still shoving themselves into metal cigars like the Hunley and hand-cranking the sub along (because and sort of motor would rapidly exhaust the stored air) was a masterpiece of prediction, with the ship run by electricity of some sort (which Verne is properly vague about the source of), the use of hydroplanes to adjust attitude, heated water to melt ice outside the ship, breathing apparatus that uses the most up-to-date technology (not used on any sub at the time, to my knowledge), and uimagining a society that used aquaculture. But his sub still lacked two items we take for granted on subs (and don’t usually notice as missing on Verne’s sub until it’s pointed out) – a periscope and torpedos.
Odder still in that periscopes had not only been used before Verne wrote, but that the most famous example was French. But periscopes of his era were heavily flawed devices – very short, lacking extensive relay systems, prone to bend when under weigh and to get filled with water or droplets. But instead of imagining that these problems could be overcome by applied engineering, he did away with them altogether. As for torpedos, military subs before his time had certainly used detachable explosive devices meant to sink enemy ships – both Bushnell’s Revolutionary War Turtle and the Confederate Hunley had done so (and both devices had, in fact, exploded, with the Hunley sinking its target). One could extrapolate some sort of fired device to do the same (Nemo doesn’t use torpedos, but he does have an underwater gun that shoots high-tech bullets). Instead, Verne went back to a much older and still-used (alkthough waning) technology – the Ram. His Nautilus simply runs into its target ships to sink them. Verne extrapolated wrong, and that’s all there is to it.
You could say the same about virtually everyone else – Wells, Doyle, Smith, Weinbaum, Heinlein, Clark, Campbell, the entire roster, whatever their motives in writing.
What’s important is what they did with what they had available to them to imagine from. Sometimes their raw scientific or engineering poredictions were remarkably on-target, more often they were not. Even with directed extrapolation (informing yourself about the likelihoods), you’re going to get a few hits and lots of errors by statistics alone. But you really should be paying attention to the other things they have to say – the social point they may be making, the allegory they’re pushing, or even the tech extrapolation they’re following, rather than simply on how accurate that prediction is. Trying to make spot-on accurate predictions about the future is the domain of Futurology, not Science Fiction.
I mean, what if The Large Hadron collider and the classical understanding of it as a physical particle collider for CERN research were actually a straight up and bald faced cover for its real purpose? What if the LHC had a secondary purpose as a Gravity Well? It’s almost like an “Optical Magnet” for focusing or causing a field of some type. A Primitive Time Machine, maybe?
Nonsense. The Large Hadron Collider couldn’t create a temporal displacement event unless they put a Moebius twist in the track.
umm, or so I’ve heard…
And of course the LHC could function in tandem with HAARP, geomagnetically. The lense for the Ray.
…and then Stephen King wrote, The Mist.
That’s one peculiar thing, I wrestle with The Mist. Is it Science Fiction or is it Horror? What do you guys think? Is it predictive or is it meta-spunk??
What strike me first in the Star Trek universe. Yes, it’s actually predicted some McGuffins (cell phones, medical scanners [of sorts]), but the “history” of the 20[sup]th[/sup] Century goes askew with the 1990s having a Eugenics War, sleeper starships, and such.
It’s horror. There is little to no science in it, sad to say. It’s one of my fav’s of his “novellas”, and I would be fascinated to see what could be the reason for the mist, but as there is no science/technological backstory, and because of the fact that King himself is a bit anti-science (imo) it is solidly in the horror realm.
Still a good read.
But there is a science/technological backstory… the rumour and speculation is that military black ops and testing is what caused the Mist? It’s almost an after thought to the immediate temporal horror of the protagonists narrative, that he doesn’t explain the infernal machine is what draws it into Sci-Fi territory for me. We are left with the effects … who cares the scientific notation when you are faced with a real time black hole?
As I’ve mentioned before, King’s The Mist bears more than a little resemblance to a British SF movie from the 1950s, The Strange World of Planet X, which played (incessantly, it seemed to me) on American TV in the early 1960s under the name The Cosmic Monsters. In that movie, a government lab’s experiments result in the opening of a dimensional crack that lets in —Giant Bugs! (They were a staple of 1950s movies, mainly since you could use stock footage of some pretty odd-looking critters and at least imply that they were huge as well). There was no mist, and there was a surprisingly British alien who wanted to help seal the rift, but the similarities are pretty striking to me. In the end everything gets All Better. The movie is definitely SF rather than Horror.
It stars Forrest Tucker, who seemed to be the All-Purpose American Hero for 1950s UK SF:
(There are several cases where I think I can see where King got his inspiration. I don’t think he’s ripping these off – he changes things pretty much, and may not even be aware he’s borrowing from elsewhere. But the similarities seem pretty strong.)