Precisely Alessan. The hot pseudo-science book in the late 60s was the remarkably silly (and stunningly wrong) book The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich and that seemed to…um…“inspire” SF writers.
When the internet started to be known, there was tons of VR/Cyberpunk stories. Drexler’s Engines of Creation became the nexus for a bunch of nano-tech stories.
Fenris
I remember a book called The Shockwave Rider, by John Brunner. It’s been years since I read it (I was in high school, so we’re going back a long time). It must have been published somewhere around 1975 or so. It had what seems to me (in retrospect) a pretty good picture of the internet, although that word wasn’t used.
There were various networks around then. The arpanet comes to mind. I know absolutely nothing about this stuff, but wasn’t that sort of the seed from which the internet grew?
Anyway, I distinctly remember Brunner’s book. Not only was the networked/connected aspect of the world as shaped by ubiquitous computers a prediction, it was pretty much the whole theme of the book.
John Brunner also wrote The Sheep Look Up which centered on ecological disaster and Stand on Zanzibar which focused on overpopulation.
Are you having a problem with your browser? Why do you keep ascribing positions to me that are the exact opposite of what I’ve explicitly written.
Yes. And the two letters were in April 1987 and November 1988. My info is from an addendum to “Literary Science Blunders” by Martin Gardner in his book of collected columns, Weird Water and Fuzzy Logic.
Agreed.
Sorry. I guess I was misinterpreting the passages you wrote which I quoted in my post. But going back and re-reading all of your posts, I still find that almost everything you wrote is about the accuracy of predictions. Are you saying you don’t think this is a relevant issue on this topic?
I thought that wasn’t so much an error of science fiction as an error of comic books.
And look at where we are today! No nuclear rockets, and we’re still not doing much in space. 
Exactly right - 1975.
Relevant quote:
Brunner also mentions “the integrated North American data-net”, renting time on “the public net”, and introduces the concept of “worms”.
Another famous extrapolation is "The Marching Morons’’ by C. M. Kornbluth published in Galaxy in 1951. Read it and weep.
Since the OP was about accuracy of predictions, and almost all the other posts in the thread have been on the accuracy of predictions, I would hope that my posts would comment on them as well, or else I would be wasting everybody’s time.
But from my very first post I have been arguing strongly that sf is not about mere accuracy of predictions, that it is difficult even to define what is meant by an accurate prediction, and that the way futures and predictions have been used in sf have changed considerably over time.
SF often - along with a multitude of other techniques - uses extrapolation of present conditions into the future to make statements about the world around the reader. This does not mean sf is about the future, that the predictions made are designed to be accurate or even technologically meaningful, or that it matters whether the future depicted even comes into being. The art of predictions in sf is a device. Nothing more.
It can be interesting to go back and look at what predictions were made - because of what it tells us of what people were thinking at the time. Unfortunately, virtually everybody seems to like making the accuracy of the predictions into something more than I think they warrant. It can be a fun game, but it should not become a comment on the value of sf.
Nope, John W. Campbell was very big on the whole “Radiation leads to telepathic/psionic supermen” thing in the late '40s through the mid '50s and pushed it on his writers. Check out Slan, (IIRC) Highways in Hiding, Children of the Atom…um…Heinlein did a number of psychic characters…didn’t one of them get it from his parents being around radiation? and so on.
The comic book notion was that radiation would produce superhumans, but the notion of radiation producing malformed monsters was pretty prevalent in “mainstream” science fiction. Take a look at Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky, for instance: The entire population living near the ship’s reactor (called “muties”, both because of their mutations and because their ancestors had mutineed) are all misshaped. Their leaders are a pair of conjoined twins, the toolsmith is a woman with four arms, etc. Or in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Wyoh is afraid to have more children, because her firstborn was a monster, which she attributes to being left in an unshielded ship on the surface during a solar storm. I don’t think that Heinlein ever had anyone gaining superpowers from radiation, but he certainly did have radiation-induced teratomas.
I don’t think Slan was a result of radiation, but Children of the Atom certainly were. Most after the war books had mutants running around - even Davy,. I think. Few giant lizards, though. 
Then I guess I did misinterpret you very badly. For what it’s worth, now that I understand your position I mostly agree with it.
johncole writes:
> Another famous extrapolation is "The Marching Morons’’ by C. M. Kornbluth
> published in Galaxy in 1951. Read it and weep.
Are you claiming that “The Marching Morons” is an example of a good prediction? What predictions there are in it are terrible. It’s claimed that in this future society the average I.Q. is 45. O.K., let’s ignore the fact that, by definition, the average I.Q. is 100. What this obviously means is that, when measured on a present-day I.Q. test, an average person in this future society has an I.Q. of 45. First, this just wouldn’t work. People with that I.Q. can’t do anything and a society with nearly everyone of that I.Q. couldn’t exist at all. The people described in this story aren’t that stupid in any case. They are more like people with an I.Q. of about 70. Second, it’s simply wrong as a prediction. Do a search on the term “Flynn Effect.” It’s been shown that the average I.Q. has been rising about 3 points per decade.
Of course, it’s not meant to be a good prediction of the future. It’s a satire, and satires are nearly always not even close to being accurate predictions. It’s a typical example of Kornbluth’s cynical attitude about everything.
The “Flynn Effect” is most likely nonsense. I believe we’ve had several threads on this topic.
Since ecological disaster caused by overpopulation is in fact the ongoing reality of our world in 2004, I don’t think we can really call that a bad prediction. It just isn’t happening as quickly as some people feared.
As far as I know, none of the major science fiction writers predicted modern self-opening beer cans. Henry Kuttner’s “The Proud Robot” had standard beer cans, the kind you needed a church key to open, being superseded by “plastibulbs”. Of course, nobody with any sense would have predicted the intermediate design, with pull tabs that separated completely from the can, leaving you with a razor-sharp piece of metal to dispose of. God, I hated those things.
Baldwin writes:
> The “Flynn Effect” is most likely nonsense.
Cite? There’s really no dispute that in every country where there has been a long history of giving I.Q. tests, the average person in any given year (who by definition would have scored 100 on the test that year) would have scored about 103 on the tests given ten years before. The only question is what this rise in I.Q. score means. No one believes that “intelligence” is really rising (even assuming that any such thing actually exists, which is questionable). There’s no way that the human race could be breeding itself into higher intelligence that fast. Something about society is changing that makes it easier for people to score higher on I.Q. tests. This may, of course, mean nothing except that I.Q. tests don’t really measure anything useful.
In any case, that’s irrelevant to my point that the prediction in “The Marching Morons” that in a future society the average I.Q. would drop to 45 is absurd. There’s no evidence that intelligence is being or could be bred out of the human race. If the average I.Q. dropped to 45 (compared to present-day society) the people would simply be impossible to manage, whereas in the story there show as merely being mildly retarded.
Of course there is. We’re better at detecting brain defects pre-natally and more inclined to abort foetuses who have them. Cutting off the bottom end of the curve raises the average.
The explanation I prefer is that IQ tests have dumbed down because telling the public they’re thick as pigshit isn’t conducive to getting your grant renewed.
Evil Death writes:
> Of course there is. We’re better at detecting brain defects pre-natally and
> more inclined to abort foetuses who have them. Cutting off the bottom end of
> the curve raises the average.
No, that’s just wrong. The number of children born with birth defects is and has always been fairly small. Nearly all of them have always either died young or have lived out their lives unable to do anything and certainly never had a chance to breed. That’s simply
> The explanation I prefer is that IQ tests have dumbed down because telling
> the public they’re thick as pigshit isn’t conducive to getting your grant renewed.
O.K., you’ve now demonstrated that you know absolutely nothing about what the Flynn Effect says. The point of the Flynn Effect is that in order to keep the average I.Q. on a test always equal to 100, the tests have actually become harder as time has gone on. There’s no dispute at all about the fact that the scores on I.Q. tests would have gone up if the same scores were used. The only dispute is what this means. Go and do some serious reading about the Flynn Effect instead of making up nonsense.
Okay, instead of making a blanket statement ("The ‘Flynn Effect’ is most likely nonsense) I should have said, “If you’re implying that the ‘Flynn Effect’ proves there’s been an overall rise in actual intelligence, I really doubt the veracity of that.” In any case, the subject deserves its own thread – and has had several – so let’s not hijack this interesting thread any more.
Getting back to the subject – Ted Sturgeon predicted fax machines in the 1940s story “Microcosmic God”. Of course, he had artificially created tiny people inventing that and a bunch of other stuff, but still. (Wouldn’t that story make a great movie, if they did it right?)
I don’t know whether any SF writer predicted this, but there really are teratogenic mutants in the modern world – from chemical teratogens, not radiation. I’ve seen pictures of Vietnamese children who were born with a missing limb because the area where their parents lived was dusted with Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. I don’t know whether anything like that happened when the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had children.