“Christ, what an imagination I’ve got”
I’ll have to read A Logic Named Joe, but I think that I’d vote for The Machine Stops as well, if only for longevity.
It didn’t just predict the internet, it predicted social media influencers. In 1909!
I attended a lecture he gave in 1976 where he brought this up, adding “I even got the color of the numbers right!” The numbers were red, like the red LED digital numbers in the first pocket calculators. But within a couple of years, those energy-devouring LED calculators had their displays replaced by the more efficient liquid crystal-polarizer displays that were gray.
So he got the color right – for a few years.
Brazil predicted with rather staggering accuracy how desk-bound employees of the future would waste time at work. (At 1:00 onward.)
ST: DS9 had crew members using large cards to do personal computing before iPads came out. By the same token, requesting the ship’s computer to search and compile records could take a few days.
The first act of Nuclear Terrorism has not happened yet.
Philip Wylie wrote about it in the early 1950s.
Wylie again–writing of Ecological Catastrophe.
I’m really hoping that it’s not 12 Monkeys.
One of Jules Verne’s most impressive predictions is still underappreciated.
In his novel Robur the Conqueror – sort of a heavier-than-air-craft version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – Verne has the titular Robur flying around the world in his craft (which he calls an aeronef ) named the Albatross, which is a sort of super-helicopter, with numerous fixed upward rotors constantly turning to keep the Albatross aloft. That’s a pretty whacko idea. It would require a virtually infinite power source, of the sort Verne imagined for the Nautilus. But that’s not the interesting part.
Verne wanted the ship to be constructed of something extremely light (for obvious reasons) yet extremely strong – something even better for this purpose that the aluminum that he had the Columbia made of for From the Earth to the Moon.
He found the ideal material. In modern terms, it was a “composite”. It really was a composite by the modern definition
(Wikipedia)
They didn’t have a term for it back then. This isn’t hedging or generous interpretation on my part. He really did have the Albatross made of composites.
(Chapter 7 – The Project Gutenberg eBook of Robur the Conqueror, by Jules Verne )
Even up to recent times, reviewers didn’t quite know what to make of this. One described the material as “a kind of plastic”. I’ve talked to professors of Aero/astro Engineering, and they seem unaware that Verne did this. Even books on the use of composites in aeronautical engineering don’t seem to notice it. But the Daedalus man-powered craft built in 1987-8 used them, and today you can buy gliders made of composites – for the same reason Verne advocated them.
More from ‘Die Frau im Mond:’
They said they would need to accelerate to 11,200 meters/second, which is escape velocity. (OK, that’s just math, but it was still impressive to have that detail in a movie of that time.)
They used a multi-stage rocket.
They wanted to limit the rocket to 4Gs of acceleration, which is pretty much what the Saturn V astronauts endured.
Weightlessness in space (although I think they missed the reason as to ‘why’ they were weightless).
They used a figure-8 trajectory, which is what the Saturn V rockets used. (Yeah, technically it’s not actually a ‘figure 8,’ but that’s the easiest way to show in on a chalkboard.)
Retro rockets to slow down the rocket for landing.
Although they did miss some factual stuff like the Moon having a breathable atmosphere, and hills full of gold.
Or did they? ? ?
Nobody’s shouted yet for the biometrics and genetic manipulations in Gattaca. Stealing someone’s fingerprints to get into Corporate, and a caste-based society with genetically engineered designer babies as the privileged elite.
Since we have to list the predictions:
I came in here to post about John Brunner, but not about Stand on Zanzibar.
I’m thinking of The Shockwave Rider.
Biometrics featured as a key plot element in the 1992 hacker film Sneakers - “My voice is my passport”.
I think it’s important to state that predicting one thing right doesn’t imply that you’ve predicted other things right. On the contrary, most pieces of science fiction get a few things right and aren’t anywhere close to other things. The reason that I read/watch/listen to/experience science fiction is to get a chance to think about some of the many things that could happen in the future.
And seven years earlier, in Foundation, he had Hari Seldon also wielding a pocket calculator: “Seldon removed his calculator pad from the pouch at his belt. Men said he kept one beneath his pillow for use in moments of wakefulness. Its gray, glossy finish was slightly worn by use. Seldon’s nimble fingers, spotted now with age, played along the hard plastic that rimmed it. Red symbols glowed out from the gray…”
I don’t recall it ever taking that long in any incarnation of ST. And personal computing on small flatscreens goes back at least to 2001: A Space Odyssey. See the third image here: » 2001 A Space Odyssey
Or this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDha7nj4s10
It was even evidence in court a decade ago: https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/did-stanley-kubrick-invent-ipad
In Verne’s work, the Nautilus was powered by batteries, charged at a hidden base with a coal mine and power plant (the smoke disguised as discharge from a volcano). It was the Disney movie that made it a mysterious and nigh-infinite power source, implied to be nuclear.
I’m well aware of that. But Verne’s submarine ran far, far longer than any submarine then (or now) could run on batteries, and he couldn’t recharge them at sea using diesel engines. His batteries were better than Tesla’s.
“The Marching Morons” (1951) by Cyril M. Kornbluth is the predecessor to “Idiocracy”. Probably little read now due to overt racism.
“I Remember Babylon” (1960) by Arthur C. Clarke: Red China will subvert the United States by beaming subtle propaganda via satellite TV. “History is on our side. We’ll be using America’s own decadence as a weapon against her, and it’s a weapon for which there’s no defence (sic)”.
Yeah, but their fiendish plan was to broadcast stuff from Indian temples and the like - stuff that wouldn’t even make it onto Pornhub today.
Clarke did uses geosynchronous satellites in a number of SF stories, including those collected in “Islands in the Sky.” The Wireless World article was first.