There has been similar research inspired by the tricorders and medical scanners from the show.
The old flip phones of the 1990s-2000s do look a lot like the communicators from TOS.
and don’t forget transparent aluminum!
Transparent aluminum wasn’t prophetic at all: There’s still no such thing, and there probably won’t ever be such a thing.
Transparent alumina does exist, but even if you count that, that’s not prophetic either, because it existed long before Star Trek. It’s better known as sapphire.
My favourite sci-fi prediction is Eric Frank Russell’s anti-empire,utopian novella, “And Then There Were None.” It’s just taking longer than he thought to get there.
Russell’s Wasp is also of note
James Sallis, writing in The Boston Globe , discusses how prescient Russell now seems. Wasp “gives off jolts of shock that Russell could not have anticipated.” Sallis quoted Russell,
Mail would be examined, and all suspicious parcels would be taken apart in a blast-proof room. There’d be a city-wide search with radiation-detectors for the component parts of a fission bomb. Civil defence would be alerted in readiness to cope with a mammoth explosion that might or might not take place. Anyone on the streets who walked with a secretive air and wore a slightly mad expression would be arrested and hauled in for questioning.[3]
To me as Brave New World has to be right up there. 1984 is a lot more well known, but while there are some great insights in 1984 as a predictor of the future Brave New World hits a lot closer.
There was a panel at an SF con discussing the same topic as this thread. Robert Bloch was in the audience; at one point he’d had enough and stood up to say “I don’t write to predict the future, I write to prevent it!”.
He may have. Lots of people have said that. But it’s most famously associated with Ray Bradbury.
On reflection I’m sure you are right, my memory played falsely with me. Thanks!
It looks like we may both 1984 and Brave New World at the same time, depending on one’s class, race, country. For a lot of people, “'If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever” may seem accurate, while others are amusing ourselves to death.
Is there any clear evidence that either of these happens more often or less often since those books were published (1949 and 1932, respectively) than they have happened over all of history? It seems to me that both of these books (as well as many of the other pieces of science fiction mentioned in this thread) have vaguely predicted events that have happened since. But it’s not clear to me that the predictions of either of them or any other story has been more true of the present than of the time before they were written. I’m talking about sociopolitical trends. Yes, technology has changed a lot. The world is still full of good, bad, and indifferent though.
I love “Wasp”, but think that “Three to Conquer” is slightly superior.
Here’s a beautiful example I just came across. I slightly shortened the florid prose.
In 3214 the professor of history at the University of Terra seated himself in front of the Visiphone and prepared to deliver the daily lecture to his class, the members of which resided in different portions of the earth.
The instrument was like a great window sash, with three or four hundred squares available.
When he pressed a button, the frosted glass squares began, one by one, to show the face and shoulders of young men.
That’s such a perfect description of a zoom teaching session that it might not have been as recognizable even five years ago.
And it gets better.
From his coat pocket, the professor withdrew an instrument which, although supplied with an earpiece and a mouthpiece, had no wires attached.
Yes, that’s the equivalent of a cellphone. And not the one that I mentioned upthread, which was even earlier.
The story is “John Jones’s Dollar,” by Harry Stephen Keeler, appearing in 1915. Most people, including me, wouldn’t recognize the name of the story, but it’s famous. It’s the story in which someone invests a dollar at 3% interest in 1914 and winds up with more money than the whole solar system by 2940.
Gernsback reprinted it and it’s in the absolutely wonderful anthology of science fiction math stories, Fantasia Mathematica, available cheap used, along with several other anthologies.
That’s amusing because of the assumption that all of the students would be male.
Not only that, but I left off the part where they all had “great bulging foreheads” because of eugenics. The shiny apple of the past always has worms in it.
Here you go.
I’ve just had a read of John Jones’s Dollar. Zoom aside, its view of inflation was a trifle optimistic. When the account reaches about $48 million in 2521 it’s deemed so large it requires its own board of directors to oversee (even though it’s doing nothing but earn interest). And the final total is $6.3 trillion, which would only cover about a third of the current US national debt and certainly wouldn’t cover the value of all private property everywhere.
OK, that’s from the April 1956 Amazing, the 30th anniversary edition. A very similar picture appeared in the April 1927 Amazing. Both are incredibly cool in retrospect.
It’s only fair to Keeler to remember that the total federal budget for 1914 was $725 million. The sum he talked about was 10,000 times bigger. The debt stood at $2.9 billion, only 3 times larger. In his era, trillions were a phantom for a far distant future for his audience.