It was overrated. The flying Sub I recall had a piece of metal get stuck in an engine. Climbing out on the wing to remove it, during a storm no less, sucked.
Well, we’re not exactly living the good life in the off-World colonies yet, are we?
The TV version of The Martian Chronicles predicted that we would colonize Mars in 2004 and nuke Earth in 2006.
Bumped.
I just read William F. Nolan’s 1977 sf novel Logan’s World, a sequel to Logan’s Run. He mentions a devastating earthquake that destroyed San Francisco and mangled but didn’t fully bring down the Golden Gate Bridge on April 16, 1988 (the Oct. 17, 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake near San Francisco was pretty bad, but not that bad, fortunately).
Also in the book, in 1991, the Crazy Horse Memorial was completed (actually still under construction in our timeline, see Crazy Horse Memorial - Wikipedia) and a massive computer complex, the Thinker, installed in the caverns beneath.
Central Park was filled in and huge skyscraper housing complexes were built there to address a NYC homelessness crisis in 1997, at the direction of Mayor Margaret Hatch (the city still hasn’t had a female mayor in our world).
The way we’re going, give it a couple of years. 
This thread comes to mind. 
Also they managed to hold the 2020 Tokyo Olympics without a Akira-esq psychic event.
Would you know if we had? I mean, that’s the thing with major psychic events.
2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, Akira, The Running Man (1987), Soylent Green, The Terminator, Reign of Fire, Pacific Rim, Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet, Roujin Z, Yesterday (2002), The Island (2005), Real Steel, Rollerball (1975), Robocop, A Scanner Darkly, Timecop, Escape from New York, Mad Max, Deathrace 2000, 1990: The Bronx Warriors, 2019: After the Fall of New York, Absolon, Americathon, Brick Mansions, Iron Sky, Annihilation Earth, I, Robot, V for Vendetta, The 6th Day, Surrogates, Terminator Salvation, Back to the Future Part II , A Boy and His Dog, The Sisterhood, “Little Lost Robot” (from Out of This World), Freejack, “L.A. 2017” (from The Name of the Game), Beyond the Time Barrier, Dog Gone Modern, Barb Wire (1996), Cherry 2000, Johnny Mnemonic, and Daybreakers
I made a list of such movies and television episodes for a possible movie day that a group I belong to might possibly do in the future, but obviously we can only do a few of them.
In the film Akira (1988) this particular event was a black hole that swallowed half of Neo-Tokyo. It’s just notable in that the final battle takes place in 2019 in an under construction Olympic stadium. As it happens the actual Olympics ended up being held in Tokyo IRL in 2020.
The version of Forever War that I read had a foreword from Haldeman in which he acknowledges that the time frame was unrealistic, but he needed the senior officers at the start of the book to be Vietnam vets so he stuck with it.
Well, 2021.
Are the years given in there the years that the book/movie was released, or the year the events in the book/movie supposedly were to take place in?
Noting that most of the items in the list have neither, so it’s really rather meaningless.
Blade Runner was set in 2019 so definitely past that one (the sequel is 2049 I think).
They’re the years that the movie was released. These are all movies and television episodes, not books. I indicate the year for the movies when there are several movies by that name.
Don’t know about Outer space drama in particular, but a big part of the set-in-the-future dates being not too far in the future is creating tension in the viewers’ minds. “Who cares about the future 0.5 kilo years away? But 25 to 50 years - that’s within my lifetime, or at least my kids’.”
By now Billy Joel should have seen the lights go out on Broadway.
(Billy Joel - Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway) (Official Audio) - YouTube)
We’ve missed the two key dates in The Door into Summer: 1970 and 2001.
In another Heinlein book, Space Cadet, there’s reference to the unsuccessful 1971 Astarte mission to Venus, and Lt. John Ezra Dahlquist’s heroic self-sacrifice to stop a military coup in 1996 (discussed at greater length in the short story “The Long Watch”).
So, after seeing all too many examples in literature, WHY would an author give specific dates for their apocalypses?
.
“The date is February 19th, 2024, and one of the rings of Saturn has come loose, heading towards earth like a spinning frisbee… one woman scientist, her loyal servant, and a robot stand against The Ring Of Saturn!”