I’ll see your The Shockwave Rider and raise you The Sheep Look Up:
"The right wing government is indifferent to these problems. The President, known as Prexy, can only offer snappy quotes in response to various disasters. When poisonings and famine become rampant, the government scapegoats Honduran communist rebels and puts the country under martial law. They resort to violence and oppression to silence their critics.
References are made to attempts to rein in the environmental destruction, but they are depicted as having made no difference to the state of the environment. Even so, one Republican Senator claims that these regulations are destroying American business.
Crime and racial and civil unrest is growing. Travel abroad is discouraged because of terrorist attacks on planes, while fewer and fewer people graduate with science, engineering, or business management degrees, as agriculture and food-related degrees are most in-demand and most likely to lead to emigration from the U.S… The number of poor people is growing while the shrinking number of the wealthy enclose themselves in walled communities guarded by armed mercenaries."
Lang took all the math from Hermann Oberth, who got it from the work of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who figured it out a generation earlier. Literally everyone in rocketry at the time, all ten of them, knew virtually all the math we know today.
[Pet peeve rant] Almost everything we think of as being invented by science fiction, meaning the stuff that appeared in sf pulps after Amazing Stories, was around much earlier, usually in the 19th century. Almost nobody reads 19th century proto-science fiction today - for very good reasons: most of it makes me want to scratch my eyeballs out - but dropping future predictions into their stories was totally common and often amazingly, I mean astoundingly, I mean very accurate.
Take this paragraph from 1880.
Cities had grown till their broad and far-reaching streets stretched away for miles; villages had become cities; rivers had, in many places, assumed the straightness of canals, while the whole face of the country, from San Francisco to Boston, was threaded by a net-work of railroad lines. The people had become numerous as the leaves of the forest or the sands of the shores; the wastes of Utah, Nevada, Colorado and Arizona were populous with cities, and blooming with fields that smiled like gardens. The deserts of the alkali and sage-brush had disappeared, and in their stead broad fields of yellow grain waved in the sunlight to the rippling notes of the lark and whistle of the quail. This way and that, toward every point of the compass, trains, laden with the treasures of commerce, thundered at the rate of one hundred miles per hour. The gas-light had disappeared from the streets, while the electric glow, soft as moonbeams, but brighter, flooded the nights; but upon the streets, as I gazed upon them, a million lights moved in a fire-fly dance, through the artificial gloaming, more numerous than the stars of the sky.
That’s not only great prediction but far better written than anything in Amazing. Yet it’s from a rancid race-baiting story called “The Battle of the Wabash. A Letter from the Invisible Police,” as by “Lorelle.”
I stumbled over a pocket telephone in a similarly-dated story the other day. As for Asimov, video calls were all over 19th century articles. I do an hour-long slide presentation on The Robot Before Asimov. By the time you get to Campbell’s Astounding, everything is old hat. It’s just a quirk of social history that these guys are remembered and their predecessors aren’t, so the johnny-come-latelys get totally unwarranted credit. [/end rant]
In terms of things I use daily, Heinlein got the bank machine right , 10 years before the first operational one in North London in 1967. Like the wireless phones, it’s just a throw-away line in ‘‘Door into Summer’’ (1957), where he comments off-handedly how convenient it is to be able to get cash after the bank is closed.
He also mentions the microwave for home kitchens in ‘‘Farmer in the Sky’’ (1950), but that was just an extrapolation of miniaturization of the existing large units (The “Radarange”, first sold in 1946). Again, it’s just an off-hand mention to establish the difference in the future, not a key plot point.
Not the most Prophetic I am sure, but give the original Star Trek it’s due…not for transporters and warp drive, but for the doors that opened automatically on people’s approach (with that annoying sound effect). Yeah, I am sure there might have been places with doors like that in 1966, but nowhere as common and completely accepted as they are today.
In Waldo, Heinlein accurately predicted remote manipulators - which to this day are still called ‘Waldoes’. It has also been claimed that he invented the water bed.
In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress he predicted emergent, sentient AI, but also that the AI would have the ability to construct a fake person on television and animate it as if it were real.
In 1941 he wrote ‘Solution Unsatisfactory’, which not only predicted the nuclear bomb, but that it would lead to a cold war, and that nuclear fallout radiation would be a severe risk.
In ‘The Door Into Summer’ (1956) he predicted Computer Aided Design:
I guess he also invented keyboard shortcuts and hot keys… And that last paragraph kind of describes parametric modeling.
In the same novel he predicts speech recognition and computers would replace secretaries:
In 1938 he predicted an ‘internet’, except then he thought it would literally be a series of tubes that could move documents anywhere. By 1983, however, he had a digital internet with a search engine similar to Google with English search terms.
And this one only came true recently - he envisioned a large private rocket being built in the desert out of steel…
Similarly, although it gets a lot of things wrong (secretaries today do not show up for work wearing g-strings and body paint), Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil is disturbingly plausible as a picture of society decaying in the 21st century: ineffectual government, inner cities abandoned to lawlessness, privately guarded enclaves, crackpot social movements, and a billionaire deciding to spend their fortune to get the heck off Earth while they still can.
In what year were earbuds invented? I can’t figure out exactly when that happened. I’m looking at the History section of the Headphones article in Wikipedia, which says that they were first used for hearing aids. Fahrenheit 451 was published in 1953. Were earbuds around then?
I guess it depends on what your definition of “earbuds” is. I remember being a child in 1969, and getting a transistor radio that had an earphone–that is, something I could stick in my right ear, in order to hear the radio, privately. It was connected to my little transistor radio by a cord.
Earbuds, however, don’t seem to need a cord. They connect via Bluetooth or similar, as Bradbury described. At least, he didn’t say that they needed to be connected by wire to anything. And they’re not, if the TV news interviews I’ve seen, featuring people with what looks like white plastic dripping from their ears, are anything to go by.
The story did “predict” a race to develop a nuclear weapon. But by the time Heinlein wrote the story, nuclear fission had been discovered, physicists were discussing the possibilities of atomic bombs, and Einstein had sent his famous letter to FDR about atomic bombs, and the Advisory Committee on Uranium had been formed. The idea of atomic bombs was very much “in the air”, and I think Heinlein isn’t “predicting” here, he’s just making informed speculation on something that was actually happening at the time.
And in the story, the projects to develop atomic bombs fail. What he did get right is the incredible lethality of plutonium dust (although in the story it’s an unspecified radioactive isotope). It’s not fission bombs, but radioactive dust sprayers that are the result of nuclear weapons programs, which is not quite how that turned out in real life. And he vastly over-predicts manufacturing capabilities to quickly produce vast quantities of highly enriched radioactive isotopes.
And there’s no Cold War. The U.S. ends World War II in a few days with its dust sprayers (bombing Germany, not Japan, which is barely even mentioned). The U.S. then demands the unilateral disarmament of every other country on Earth, and it fights a Four Day War dust war with the “Eurasian Union” (the U.S.S.R.), and emerges victorious. At which point the scientists, engineers, and pilots of the Air Patrol form a breakaway civilization that enforces total world peace through threats of dusting any country (including the U.S.) that violates its dictates. So, just a bit different than the Cold War of our history.
Heinlein did get a number of predictions right, though. Even though his endpoint is radioactive dust not fission bombs, he got the timeline pretty close - the U.S. uses his version of nuclear weapons in early 1945. He also, quite presciently, briefly discusses several concepts which would become central to discussions of the Cold War, such as the pressures of a nuclear arms race, mutual assured destruction, and second strike capabilities.
In the annotated edition of A Fire Upon The Deep, Vernor Vinge predicted modern-day media bubbles, using only his experience with then-current Usenet as his basis.
You have a quotation mark at the beginning of these three paragraphs and another one at the end of them, which implies that all three paragraphs are quoted from the same thing. It appears to me that this isn’t true. The first paragraph and the third paragraph are quoted from the Wikipedia entry on The Sheep Look Up. The second paragraph isn’t.
Some of this may be accurate predictions for today, but some isn’t. Most of it is no more true today than it was in 1972, when The Sheep Look Up was published, than today. Some is certainly less true. More people graduate today with “science, engineering, or business management degrees” than in 1972. This is about trends that come and go, which doesn’t make it an accurate prediction.
And everything about atomic bombs, atomic war, and atomic power had been discussed for a generation before Heinlein wrote a word. H. Bruce Franklin’s War Stars discusses dozens of examples. Robert Cromie’s The Crack of Doom “imagines a mad scientist unleashing the power of the atom.” This was in 1895. H. G. Wells’ The World Set Free, serialized from 1913-1914, calls its device an “atomic bomb,” made after scientists split the atom in 1933, dead on. The Pallid Giant from 1927 is fear, fear of the destructive power of the atom. Harold Nicholson foresaw rocket planes delivering atomic bombs in 1932’s Public Faces, with an atomic war started by diplomatic bungling and military hubris. Carl W. Spohr’s The Final War, also 1932, puts the world into armageddon when a mini-atomic bomb is used, leading to world-wide escalation.
The most important atomic story in 1940 wasn’t Heinlein’s, but by Fred Allhoff. Lightining in the Night was serialized in the weekly Liberty, one of the highest circulation magazines in the U.S., with dozens of times Astounding’s readership. After a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan, the USSR, and Germany attack and conquer the east and west coasts (hi there Philip K. Dick). The only hope is to race the Nazis to developing an atomic superweapon from U-235, explained by a thorough recapitulation of everything known about how to build an atomic bomb. Spoiler: the Nazis get there first since the yarn is a jingoistic warning of preparedness.
Speaking of Heinlein, he absolutely did not invent the waldo. Who says? Heinlein says. He said explicitly that when searching for a story idea he remembered an article in Popular Mechanics from 1918 about a man with myesthenia gravis, who had created such a device for himself. Taking a real invention and storyizing it may make for a good story but it’s the antithesis of invention.
Looking at prophesies in fiction is a fun game, but only in very rare instances do they ever amount to inventiveness. About 99.9% of the time, writers take their ideas from reality and nonfiction. Again, there’s nothing wrong with doing so and the result may live on long past the original context. But it is wrong to credit them with inventing an idea, or concept, or machine when somebody else had already put it into print.
Another interesting example of something related to atomic bombs is the 1937 story “By the Waters of Babylon” by Stephen Vincent Benét. It’s about the someone exploring New York City many years after all of civilization in the world has been destroyed by something like a world war where atomic bombs were used. There is only the vaguest knowledge of the world before the war by the few remaining people.
As someone who watched (some of) TOS in its original run, I can’t say how freaked out I was the first time that happened. But also, for PADDS, communicators, little plastic discs that held huge amounts of data, medical scanning equipment, etc.
In 2016, a demagogue right-wing white supremacist candidate ran with the backing of Christian fundamentalists and won the presidency with a slogan of “Make America Great Again.”