# Most prescient piece of science fiction **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Tags:** star-trek-paramount\ **Created:** [August 24, 2024, 2:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-prescient-piece-of-science-fiction/1006128 "2024-08-24T02:20:28Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Whack-a-Mole](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/whack-a-mole/32/141_2.png) [@Whack-a-Mole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whack-a-Mole)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2024, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-prescient-piece-of-science-fiction/1006128/21 "2024-08-24T19:44:20Z")
> [@Llama\_Llogophile](#): > > Arthur C. Clarke envisioned the internet with pretty good accuracy as well as communications satellites. Of course, at the time he was writing those things were somewhat in the works, so I suspect he was sort of reporting from what he knew was happening in tech. IIRC Clarke kinda invented the notion of communication satellites (if not the actual satellites themselves…not sure how far that went). ---
**Author:** ![Banksiaman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/banksiaman/32/3334_2.png) [@Banksiaman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Banksiaman)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2024, 9:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-prescient-piece-of-science-fiction/1006128/22 "2024-08-24T21:03:33Z")
Doubly true of _Contagion_, directed by Steven Soderbergh. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2024, 9:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-prescient-piece-of-science-fiction/1006128/23 "2024-08-24T21:11:33Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > The entire visual computer-driven internet predicted in 1946, before anyone even knew of computers and far before anyone had hooked up a screen to them. And he gets it down to the personal and trivial, at a time when the future was supposed to be impersonal and weighted with importance. Absolutely remarkable. Agreed – I point this out to people frequently. There are other examples of the same kind of thing – H.G. Wells’ “World Brain” or Arthur C. Clarke’s 1964 predictions (although that was only two years before ARPANET was initiated). But Leinster gets extra points for getting a lot of it right, including kids downloading porn. It’s interesting that Leinster imaging his “logics” to have “censorship circuits”, and the problems start when those are defeated. The internet never did have Censor Circuits to prevent access to information better kept guarded, or to protect public morality. But what’s rreally interesting to me is how this concept, so fundamental to the way we live today, wasn’t picked up and elaborated by other writers, or even the originalauthors themselves. Leinster never wrote about Logics again. Clarke didn’t include anything like the internet in his fiction until it was a reality. It’s like a lot of examples of in science of people coming up with a world-shattering idea and not following up on it (Claudius Ptolemy drew up what was effectively the first table of sines and the experiments to calculate Snell’s law – but never connected the two, or did anything with them. Francis Hopkinson made the first artifical diffractopn grating and made the measurements necessary to calculate the wavelength of light – but never did calculate the wavelengths of the different colors. Isaac Newton actually DID calculate the wavelengths of different colors of light, but didn’t believe in the wave nature of light, so he never identified his characteristic lengths with wavelengths. As someone once said, “people will sometimes stumble over the truth, but most of the time they’ll pick themselves up and just keep going.” ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2024, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-prescient-piece-of-science-fiction/1006128/24 "2024-08-24T21:16:44Z")
> [@Banksiaman](#): > > Doubly true of _Contagion_, directed by Steven Soderbergh. As I remember, that movie attracted renewed attention in 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The New York Times [reported](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/business/media/coronavirus-contagion-movie.html) in March 2020 > According to Warner Bros., the film was listed as No. 270 among its catalog titles at the end of December. Since the start of 2020, it has jumped to second, bested only by Harry Potter movies. “Contagion” is also trending on Amazon Prime Video and has flirted with the iTunes top 10. ---
**Author:** ![Kent\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kent_clark/32/105_2.png) [@Kent\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kent_Clark)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2024, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-prescient-piece-of-science-fiction/1006128/25 "2024-08-24T22:03:58Z")
_The Adventures of Superman_ had the bad guys using radio-controlled drones to blow up distant targets. Fortunately, Superman flew faster than the drones. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2024, 10:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-prescient-piece-of-science-fiction/1006128/26 "2024-08-24T22:40:13Z")
> [@Whack-a-Mole](#): > > George Orwell’s _1984_ should be on a list like this. 1984 was postscient, not prescient. All of the things that he wrote about were things that had already happened and were happening. It doesn’t speak well for us that they’re still happening, but it didn’t take a prophet to anticipate that. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2024, 11:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-prescient-piece-of-science-fiction/1006128/27 "2024-08-24T23:06:39Z")
> [@Kent\_Clark](#): > > _The Adventures of Superman_ had the bad guys using radio-controlled drones to blow up distant targets. Fortunately, Superman flew faster than the drones. **The Barsac Mission** , supposedly by Jules Verne, but actually written by his son Michel, was serialized in 1914, and published in book form in 1919. (It is actually a complete rewrite from some fragments Jules Verne left unfinished at his death, but virtually everything in the book is Michel’s imagination) It features a super-scientific city in the Sahara desert and remote-controlled drones (called “wasps”) that can be used to attack things. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2024, 11:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-prescient-piece-of-science-fiction/1006128/28 "2024-08-24T23:15:46Z")
> [@Roderick\_Femm](#): > > It predicted the likelihood of world war happening again in 1940 (11 years in their future), and it projected that the two chief antagonists would be arms manufacturers secretly mongering war in a cabal for their own profit, and a huge peace movement supported by ordinary people, with the official governments as mostly helpless pawns But… This isn’t at all how WW2 went down? ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2024, 11:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-prescient-piece-of-science-fiction/1006128/29 "2024-08-24T23:19:22Z")
I’ll nominate _Blindsight_, a book whose main antagonist is basically an alien ChatGPT ---
**Author:** ![peccavi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/peccavi/32/388_2.png) [@peccavi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/peccavi)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2024, 11:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-prescient-piece-of-science-fiction/1006128/30 "2024-08-24T23:29:19Z")
> [@snowthx](#): > > The emergence of AI and all the questions about how to manage it… > > _Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug._ Not as prescient as one would think, given that it was made sixteen years after **Stand on Zanzibar** (John Brunner, 1968) featured a supercomputer that achieves sentience, Shalmaneser, capturing all of the data in the world and thinking: _“Christ, what an imagination I’ve got.”_ Brunner was a prolific predictor (there are [lists](https://themillions.com/2013/03/the-weird-1969-new-wave-sci-fi-novel-that-correctly-predicted-the-current-day.html) that highlight this) and somewhat the sci-fi writers writer, with influence carrying into the books of others. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [August 24, 2024, 11:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-prescient-piece-of-science-fiction/1006128/31 "2024-08-24T23:55:31Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Fahrenheit 451 had flat screen TVs way earlier than this. The _Popular Mechanics_ article was about a real-world television. It’s the earliest mention I’ve found. Bradbury did a lot with screens. “The Veldt” is a 1950 short story with a room of four wall screens simulating virtual reality. There’s also a 1963 Keith Laumer story called, appropriately, “The Walls,” that features four wall screens. Movies, projectors, and screens made flat pictures obvious. When televisions came in, the focus shifted to them. Stories could use either or leave the method vague and futuristic. ---
**Author:** ![Nyvaak](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/5f8ce5/32.png) [@Nyvaak](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nyvaak)\ **Post date:** [August 25, 2024, 12:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-prescient-piece-of-science-fiction/1006128/32 "2024-08-25T00:17:18Z")
Perhaps Mad Magazine doesn’t count as science fiction, but they sure had a prescient piece back in 1957 when they showed [fake backdrops](https://cidu.info/tag/mad-magazine/) for video phone calls. Today’s virtual backdrops have nothing on these pull-down screens to fool the person at the other end. ---
**Author:** ![E-DUB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/e-dub/32/403_2.png) [@E-DUB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/E-DUB)\ **Post date:** [August 25, 2024, 12:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-prescient-piece-of-science-fiction/1006128/33 "2024-08-25T00:18:11Z")
The 1964 film “First men in the Moon” showed a lunar landing, long a staple of SF, but it showed the landing being broadcast live back to Earth. Don’t think that had been done before. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [August 25, 2024, 12:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-prescient-piece-of-science-fiction/1006128/34 "2024-08-25T00:24:25Z")
There’s an illustration in an early science fiction magazine which shows a professor teaching a course in front of a lot of television screens with each one showing a student. It’s like a Zoom meeting except that the screens are all the size of ordinary television screens. They are though on a wall where they are arranged like the individuals in Zoom meetings. I think we discussed this once. ---
**Author:** ![Ike\_Witt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ike_witt/32/283_2.png) [@Ike\_Witt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ike_Witt)\ **Post date:** [August 25, 2024, 1:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-prescient-piece-of-science-fiction/1006128/35 "2024-08-25T01:32:09Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Fahrenheit 451 had flat screen TVs Not just flat screens but 16:9. ---
**Author:** ![pirviii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pirviii/32/3233_2.png) [@pirviii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pirviii)\ **Post date:** [August 25, 2024, 2:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-prescient-piece-of-science-fiction/1006128/36 "2024-08-25T02:42:42Z")
> [@kenobi\_65](#): > > The “PADD” portable tablet device in ST:TNG was very similar, in form and function, to tablets like the iPad, which came out 20 years later. This one is a near miss, they treat them like note books that have to physically be handed around, no network access or email I guess. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [August 25, 2024, 2:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-prescient-piece-of-science-fiction/1006128/37 "2024-08-25T02:49:06Z")
As I remember from one of the Star Trek shows, one character actually carried multiple PADDs, each containing a different book. ---
**Author:** ![kenobi\_65](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kenobi_65/32/13178_2.png) [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)\ **Post date:** [August 25, 2024, 2:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-prescient-piece-of-science-fiction/1006128/38 "2024-08-25T02:54:48Z")
> [@Dewey\_Finn](#): > > one character actually carried multiple PADDs, each containing a different book. I actually found that picture earlier today, when I made my post about PADD, though it doesn’t look like I post it. ☹ ---
**Author:** ![beowulff](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/beowulff/32/542_2.png) [@beowulff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/beowulff)\ **Post date:** [August 25, 2024, 3:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-prescient-piece-of-science-fiction/1006128/39 "2024-08-25T03:07:57Z")
Well, I know someone who has something like 15 iPhones and MacBooks, because when she dedicates each one to a specific task… ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [August 25, 2024, 4:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-prescient-piece-of-science-fiction/1006128/40 "2024-08-25T04:30:17Z")
In the presient 1973 Larry Niven story _Flash Crowd_ (which predicted flash mobs) Niven describes someone stealing televisions: > He tried to keep the camera over his head. He got a big brawny hairy type carrying a stack of teevees under his arm, half a dozen twenty-inch sets almost an inch thick. There was a unneeded expansion of the short in 2014 called _Red Tide_ (and done by a Sad Puppy) that needlessly changed the text: > He tried to keep the camera over his head. He got a big, brawny, hairy type carrying a stack of flatscreen LCD televisions under his arm: half a dozen twenty-inch sets, each almost an inch thick. > **[Flash Crowd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Crowd)** > > "Flash Crowd" is a 1973 English-language novella by science fiction author Larry Niven, one of a series about the social consequence of inventing an instant, practically free displacement booth. > One consequence not foreseen by the builders of the system was that with the almost immediate reporting of newsworthy events, tens of thousands of people worldwide – along with criminals – would teleport to the scene of anything interesting, thus creating disorder and confusion. The plot centers around a... > **[Larry Niven – Flash Crowd](https://zigstedimension.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/larry-niven-flash-crowd/)** > > \-1- FROM EDGE to edge and for all of its length, from Central Los Angeles through Beverly Hills and West Los Angeles and Santa Monica to the sea, Wilshire Boulevard was a walkway. Once there had be… [https://www.sffworld.com/2014/10/red-tide-larry-niven-brad-r-torgersen-matthew-j-harrington/](https://www.sffworld.com/2014/10/red-tide-larry-niven-brad-r-torgersen-matthew-j-harrington/) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-prescient-piece-of-science-fiction/1006128.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-prescient-piece-of-science-fiction/1006128.md?page=3)