Socrates was opposed to the whole “writing” thing.
Guessing that a computer would come to life doesn’t seem like that much of an imaginative leap, it seems to me; it’s basically a variation of the Frankenstein story. Or perhaps even the Pygmalion and Galatea myth.
The one that still amazes me is Jules Verne, writing in Robur the Conqueror (1886) about a heavier-than-air flying machine. It’s sort of like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, only with an aircraft rather than a submarine. His Albatross is a sort of super-helicopter, with multiple vertical rotors keeping it aloft, which is actually not a practical idea.
No, what mazes me is what the Albatross is made of. It’s not steel, or even aluminum (like the ship in From the Earth to the Moon). It’s another substance noted for its light weight and great strength.
Verne imaging the Albatross made of composites
Such paper-based composites were used in Verne’s time to make railroad wheels that offered a very smooth ride. They were also used for other projects requiring great strength and light weight.
It’s so prescient that nobody thought of using composites on airplanes in the Real World for another seventy years, and composites didn’t really become important until they started building human-powered aircraft like the Daedalus, where light weight became very important. That craft used carbon-fiber composites.
Yes, clock. Sorry. Fits with my contention that the Future keeps being lost and then repredicted and then lost again and then discovered as an archaeological treasure.
Nothing better to illustrate this than the flying car. The first newspaper story I can find of a flying car appeared on August 18, 1901, which would make it the first heavier-than-air flight as well. (Some people still insist this to be the case although it was a fictionalized version of a failed attempt.) It was forgotten. In 1917, a flying car was exhibited at an airshow. It never flew. It was forgotten. In 1921, a flying car might have flown in France. It was forgotten. In 1937 Waldo Waterman flew a car. The flying car was here for sure! It was forgotten.
A convoy of flying cars appeared from then until now, some announced, some prototypes, a few for sale. Almost inevitably newspapers treated each as the first flying car, here at last. The internet does better, with many writers - including me - documenting the long history, but seems to be talking in an echo chamber.
To be fair, history is too vast and too deep to be comprehended by any one person. Specialists are needed to mine the nuggets. The history of the Future is a tiny, neglected niche even among historians. I admit to getting frustrated about how little attention is paid to what I think is an important aspect of our technological society. I’m sure that Cal, who has written many wonderful articles that touch on it through optics, must feel the same.
Science fiction is the way that the majority of people look at past glimpses of possible futures. Yet too many people seem to think that this is the only way, that the writers invented the future out of their own heads rather than reading the news and extrapolating it into a story. Another frustration.
I’ve come to the point where I’d rather read bad newspaper articles than bad fiction. But I’m weird.
Missed this. J. Schlossel, in 1928, wrote “To the Moon By Proxy,” in which a paralyzed inventor sends his robot to the moon, through whose “eyes” he can see everything via “radio television.”
Not to even mention Colossus by D. F. Jones (1966), adapted into the movie Colossus: The Forbin Project in 1970.
Mack Reynolds, in stories set in a future where everyone had shares of a stock fund that paid enough dividends to live on and couldn’t be sold, often had his protagonists use cash to avoid being traced, which they could be if they used credit cards. This was in the very early 1960s. Credit cards existed, but they couldn’t be traced immediately back then, and were not as common.
Oh, the idea of sentient and powerful computers goes back way before D.F. Jones.
One of my favorites is the 1954 short-short story Answer by Fredric Brown (the master of the short-short). Boiled down to its even shorter essence:
Brown’s story was written two years before Asimov’s much more famous “The Last Question,” which has a similar ending.
Aldous Huxley predicted both IVF and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome in Brave New World back in 1931.
He predicted a medical condition that had already existed for thousands of years?
I don’t know if it was formally described in medicine at the time. Also, did BNW specifically say that alcohol was what was used to produce deltas and epsilons?
The Transatlantic Tunnel from 1935 predicted flat screen TV and videophones. It was about an American and British plan to build an undersea tunnel connecting New York and London. Several decades before the Chunnel was built (1994) connecting England and Europe.
He identified a condition that was not yet “formally known” to medical science when the novel was published.
And to answer Lumpy, yes; “Brave New World” explicitly says that alcohol was used to stunt the development of fetuses that were to be created as “lower castes”. One of the main characters, Bernard Marx, is an Alpha+, but is shorter than other people of his high caste. There are whispers behind his back that the worker assigned to his batch of embryos added alcohol by mistake to the circulation system of the artificial womb where Bernard’s embryo was developing.
Ender’s Game published in 1984 didn’t get the part about being at war with aliens correct. But there is a subplot involving Ender’s brother and sister who are influential bloggers and social media stars, before these concepts existed.
Adam Carolla had (still has) a superpopular podcast that he spun off into a 2014 book about everything he thought was wrong with the world and his simple solutions. He called it President Me. Scott Card was more prescient than he knew.
I own that book.
Oddly, they didnt add in smoking?
That would have to be an effect of nicotine in particular, since in vitro fetuses can’t smoke.