Let’s Visit the World of the Future! 
You could download it in 2003 – don’t know if you still can.
I never read it, but wanted to just for the reason it belongs in this thread.
The book, **Paris in the Twentieth Century ** by Jules Verne
Written in 1863(!) and depicting a mid-20th centruy Paris…
It’s probably the reason I stayed away, it’s supposed to suck…
While many fans attribute numerous important concepts of cyberspace to author William Gibson, I’d like to look a bit farther back, to True Names. In this striking work of fiction (written in 1979 and published in 1981, long before personal computers and the Web became part of our daily lives), Vernor Vinge gives vividly imagined details of many concepts which are everyday Internet realities today. Vinge’s online communities prefigure chatrooms and multi-user domains in an uncannily accurate fashion (complete with a few disagreeable and destructive individuals who take pleasure in wreaking havoc). Vinge was, as far as I can tell, the first SF writer to use the term “avatar” to describe a digital image that represents an anonymous user. Vinge called the online access point a “portal.” As you read this 25-year-old story, it seems contemporary: much of what was fictional in 1979 is factual today.
And Orwell (my personal hero) got it flat wrong, IMO. Psychologically, I mean. When O’Brien finally explains to Winston Smith the Inner Party’s real core motives, it turns out to be a politics based on sadomasochism. The leaders don’t want luxury or long life or happiness for themselves, only power. The aim of power is power – “An endless pressing, pressing, pressing on the nerve of power!” And how does one man prove his power over another? By making him suffer – otherwise you cannot be sure he is obeying your will and not his own. Thus, dissidents like Smith are essential, even to be quietly encouraged and enabled – because without such, the Inner Party members would not have the pleasure of breaking down their minds and building them up again.
There might be some dictators or party officials whose minds actually work that way. There might even be some few who, like O’Brien, are consciously aware of it and revel in it. But it’s not essential to the system of Communism or even Nazism. Communism was founded by truly high-minded, altruistic men like Lenin and Trosky, who had the arrogance to presume they knew what was best for all, and to such a degree of scientific certainty that they owed no more tolerance to dissenting views than astronomers owe to the Flat Earth Society. The real tragedy of Communism is that it is a classic case of good intentions paving the road to Hell. As for the Nazis, they thought about everything in national or “racial” terms – they were as different from Oceania’s English Socialist Party as if they came from a different planet.
I’m hoping Heinlein was wrong about the whole Nehemiah Scudder/Fundie situation, but I’m not entirely convinced he was. If anything, Shrub may have started the ball rolling a little early. Admiral Bob had his Fundie get elected in 2012…
I don’t know about total accuracy, but some aspects of John Carpenter’s They Live seem a bit prescient:
–The ever-growing division between the rich and the poor
–The increasing numbers of the “working poor”. We’re not at the point where working people live in tent cities just yet, but with real estate prices skyrocketing across the nation and the increasing number of million-dollar condos being constructed (at least here in Vegas), one wonders not if, but when it will come to pass.
–The almost hypnotic state of apathy/contentment of the general population. For quite a while, people have been in lockstep with the current administration’s “war on terror” while being blissfully ignorant of the cost in money, human lives, our freedoms, etc. It is only lately that the populace seems to be “waking up” to the reality of our situation and have begun speaking out in increasing numbers.
Now, obviously, we haven’t been taken over by a greedy alien race, but watch a couple of hours of Fox News, then watch this movie. I’ll bet you anything that, even for just a fleeting second, you’ll find yourself going, “Hmmmmm…”
I was going to say Jules Verne as well. Verne’s very famous for having predicted many future developments (various technologies, space travel, etc.) so much so that The Onion had a parody article about a newly discovered Jules Verne story in which he predicts the invention of cell phones.
Prescient? The film wasn’t set in the future. My take was, Carpenter was predicting nothing, he was providing a fantastic explanation for the status quo. It’s interesting to compare They Live with the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The 1956 film was based in a perfectly nice (for middle-class white people) society, threatened by Evil Aliens who wanted to slip in and take it over. The 1988 film was set in a society where things had so far turned to shit, that the only explanation was, the Evil Aliens are already in charge!
How about The Running Man? I distinctly remember when I saw the movie that I found it a little over the top that (a) the government would be able to manipulate the media so completely, (b) that the public taste for capital punishment would ever get so high that it would intersect (c) a taste for live action gladiatorial combat.
Well, FOX news is pretty much a mouthpiece for the Republican party, our collective taste for lurid violence has only grown, and “Reality TV” gets ever closer to deathsport. I really believe we could see something not too dissimilar to “The Running Man” on air in the US within 20 years, in some possible futures.
Every time I flip past Fox News or some right wing conservative pundit pontificating I figure the world postulated in The Marching Morons is one step closer to reality…
Spay and neuter your pets, people, is all I’m sayin’… 
One of Robert J. Sawyer’s books (I can’t remember which one at the moment) accurately predicted the name of the new pope.
Which isn’t as impressive as a lot of other predictions, IMO, since, if you postulate that the Pope would continue a “named line,” the possible names and numbers are already defined.
This may be a GD thread…
Tonight! In Madison Square Garden! For a purse of $10 million! 25 Iranian prisoners of war vs. the East LA Crips!
Tonight’s weapon: Chainsaws!
To ensure a vigorous contest, all survivors of the losing team will be crucified . . .
Good point. How many lines are there?
One of my personal crackpot theories (it may be time for a new thread on that…) is that there will, in fact, be live gladiatorial combat, or something like it, on television within, perhaps, 10 years. We already are willing to torment the “contestants” pyschologically, emotionally and even physically (Survivor, I’m a Celebrity…, et al), and recently there was a live TV stunt fo a magician playing Russian roulette with another man, firing the single loaded chamber into a wall.
I reckon we’ll start seeing people willing to risk their lives openly in five years, doing foolhardy things like ridiculous stunts or playing with wild animals first. A few will die, the networks will realise that nobody minded much (and that viewing figures went through the roof), and Who Wants to Be a Sacrifice on the Altar of Public Voyeurism will be the favourite program of 2016.
As predicted by Running Man, of course (man, I almost strayed from the OP there! Glad I dodged that bullet! 
)
If it was legal to do a show like that, I think there’s money to be made with the concept.
LET’S GET READY TO RUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUM-BLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLE!
Instead of Stephen King’s take, why not give credit to Robert Sheckley? His Prize of Peril predicted life-or-death game shows on TV three decacades before The Running Man. Heck, it was filmed twice, one time before Stephen King started being published:
According to Harlan Ellison, Sheckley phoned him when he first heard about “The Running Man”, and wondered why King was ripping him off. They didn’t think that was like King, and concluded that he’d probably read and forgotten about TPoP, and it resurfaced from his subconscious. I’ve noticed a lot of such recycled plots in King’s work.
Always nice to see a lively discussion!
I was actually going to say that I think the film version of V for Vendetta is probably the potentially closest for how society- at least in the UK- could potentially look in the next 15 years or so.
I don’t mean with the whole Totalitarian Party and the Blackbaggers and so on… but the actual visuals (ie, everything looks much as it does now, but there’s lots of nifty techno-gadgets) is, in IMO, probably a fairly accurate view of how things will look. I’ll get back to you in 2021. 
The OP was aiming for the fictional work that got the closest overall feel to what things should look like when the time period in question finally came around- so while it’s pretty amazing that Jules Verne predicted Fax Machines and Robert A. Heinlein foresaw cellular phones, it’s slightly outside the scope of the OP- as fascinating a subject as it is in its own right, though!