In the 40’s and 50’s, Asimov completely missed the minituarization (sp) of computers. Most of his stories that dealt with the subject tended to have ONE BIG COMPUTER with people hooking into it via terminals.
Not really science fiction, but this was done in the graphic novel Camelot 3000.
Exaopno’s quite right about SF being about the present. I just read John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades. They’re great books – the latest take on Soldiers of the Future, and are invariably compared to Starship Troopers and Forever War. But the ideas and terminology are heavily linked to Right Now. Soldiers use PDAs (Scalzi doesn’t even bother to say what that set of initials stands for) and similar current computer concepts and terminology. In twenty years – less, probably – these books are going to look horribly dated. But Scalzi didn’t write them for twenty years from now. He wrote them for Now.
That said, there are some writers whose exttrapolations are pretty hard not to judge against the actual performance of the reality when that eventually came around. Take Jules Verne. His 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is probably his best known work, and a classic, and he extrapolated about the submarine. A lot of it is pretty good, too. Verne did his homework. But he managed to miss at least two items, the absence of which looks odd in retrospect. His Nautilus carries no torpedoes – Nemo sinks ships by ramming them. It seems a very weird omission. Certainly there were plenty of projectile weapons under other circumstances to suggest the idea. Real-life Submarines well before Verne had used explosives. Bushnell’s Turtle had, back during the Revolutionary War. It had gone off, too, although not attached to the British ship Eagle it was trying to sink. The Civil war Hunley had successfully sunk the Housatonic with its spar-attached torpedo. Neither of these was a free-running device, but that’s the kind of thing Verne could extrapolate.
Even more surprising to modern eyes, the Nautilus lacked a periscope. Arguably the periscope is not as obvious an idea as we might think, but it’s definitely a missed extrapolation.
I’ve heard it said before that the original significance of the Television as a medium of entertainment was overlooked. At first, everyone seemed to think it was going to be primarily or solely an instrument of communication. Heck, Verne himself uses it as such in two of his works, and it was shown in that fashion even after Huge Gernsback began his pioneering broadcasts that were clearly one-way and not communicative (Carl Sagan got it wrong in Contact. Long before Adolph Hitler got beamed into space, Gernsback’s station was broadcasting pictures of …Felix the Cat.)
Another pretty obvious mismatch between the predictions of fiction and reality was the use of robots and computers. Man-shaped robots were ubiquitous in old SF, of course. And, even after computers came on the scene, they continued to be huge and unwieldy, with people using slide rules and differential analyzers. Nobody seems to have anticipated Moore’s Law and miniaturized computers (I was at a lecture Asimov gave in the mid-1970s, where he pointed out that he “got it right” with “Pocket Calculators”, using the actual term in his “Foundation” stories. He even read a brief passage that talked about the “red numbers”. “I even got the color right!” he bragged. But only a couple of years later the calculator manufacturers switched from the energy-gulping red LED displays to more efficient LCD displays. Asimov may have been rightm, but only for a brief while.)
And, despite Wells’ writing about “The World Brain” and Murray Leinster’s “A Logic Named Joe”, and quasi examples in a couple of promotional films from the 1960s, SF almost completely missed the Internet. Even as late as the early 1990s, when it was becoming a popular reality, not resptricted to DARPANET and the like, you didn’t have anything like it showing up in SF stories. NOW it’s there, in Harry Turtledove’s Colonization series and Scalzi’s books and others. But people were surprisingly slow to latch onto this idea.
I haven’t read Ender’s Game but it was written in 1994 so I would think the internet in it’s current form could be more easily predicted.
The stories I’ve read from the 60’s and earlier would have as part of the backgroud some unspecified computer network or system that could be consulted for information. The internet of today, with anyone able to set up a website with no control or oversight of content, I never saw anything close.
Actually, Ender’s Game was released in 1985.
Oops. I Googled the book and the first link had 1994. Maybe that was a later printing.
See what I mean about accuracy? 
There had been speculations about this sort of thing long before, as I pointed out in my post above. H. G. Wells was writing about an Internet-like item in his “The World Brain”. Vannevar Bush speculated about a central information depot that, as Exapno has pointed out, was probably the basis for Murray Leinster’s story “A Logic named Joe” from the 1940s (It depicts people getting information on building bombs from it, and has kids downloading porn. Talk about prediction!)
A few films and magazine articles from the 1950s and 1960s show people doing shopping from home using a television-like device.
Arthur C. Clarke wrote about something very much like the Internet in the 1970s and earely 1980s, but that was when we actually had DARPANET, so it’s an easier extrapolation. By the time Orson Scott Card wrote “Ender’s Game”, there was already quite a tradition of this in SF, although predicting bloggers is pretty impressive.
Nevertheless, this was all pretty sparse in a field that’s often seen as predicting the future. By and large, most SF, from cheap TV series to hardcore SF by the masters seems to have missed the idea and implications of the Internet until it was already upon us.
It’s a great irony that the future predictions we talk about today come from a handful of stories that were considered sub-literary throwaways at the time they were written. Even considering the prodigious egos in that crowd - you could hardly walk into the same room as an Asimov or Heinlein without clawing a path through ego as thick as a berserk cotton candy machine’s overflow - it’s impossible to imagine their thinking at the time that the stories they knocked off over their lunch hours would be examined a half century or more later for their predictive correctness.
If any of them were to be honest - and that’s also pretty much unimaginable - most of them would have to admit that they weren’t even making up their futures themselves. The other half of the great irony is that much of the future they put into their stories were taken from newspaper articles or other popular media of the day. The internet is bringing much of that forgotten history back and the increase in books examining recent and popular history digs up much more of it.
The world of tomorrow was a popular theme especially during the dark days of the Depression, when not much progress was being made in the real world. Newspapers knew they could always find a good audience for the latest speculations on the house of tomorrow or streamlined cars or pneumatic transport or long-distance communication. All this stuff was in the air for them the same way that the internet and talk about what it will mean for the future of books or movies or politics is in the air for us.
Yeah, it can be a bit disillusioning to read an article in Colliers or Architectural Digest and realize that a bunch of sf writers stole their fantastic futures from some designer’s conceptual drawings instead of being so brilliant that they dreamed it all up themselves. Fortunately, I think that aspect of what they did is a tiny piece of what made them readable then and what keeps them readable now.
Link to Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think article.
William Gibson is often credited as predicting the Internet and World Wide Web. I’m not familiar with his work myself.
The terminal “e.”
A slight sidetrack but I believe the reason for the Hitler transmission was that it was earliest television signal that was strong enough to reach the aliens, not the earliest signal period.
Orwell’s 1984 had webcams
Most of the Internet was effectively in place by the time Gibson hit it big. It seems odd to credit him with “predicting” the internet.
See here: History of the Internet - Wikipedia
and my posts above.
“Captain we need to get off this planet now!”
“I think you’re right Spock”
clik-clik-clik-tap-clik-tap-tap
“Captain, what are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m texting Scotty.”
Which was published in 1982. I can predict the Giants will beat the Patriots now. My point was that nobody predicted it back in the thirties or forties. Some authors, like Heinlein, might have written about some interruption of space exploration because of a major crisis. But I don’t think anyone ever thought we would go the moon and then just decide to quit.
John Brunner’s “The Shockwave Rider” circa 1974 had what one would recognize as the internet, complete with a script/virus that made hidden data made visible to all.
Why should Hitler’s be stronger than Gernsback’s?
I think Sagan was just going for shock value.
Not so much a lack of predictive ability as a gross underestimation of the resistance by the proud people of Wisconsin to the encroachments of flatlanders.
Breast implants?
In Sci-fi those are always real.
Except predictions about travel to the moon assumed that we’d have to wait for nuclear rockets, and once you had a nuclear rocket you could just blast off, aim for the moon, land, blast off again, aim for the earth, and land again, all on one tank of fuel, and that rocket would be no more expensive than a jet plane.
Except real life doesn’t work that way, we’re still waiting for the magic spacedrive that would make such a space program possible. The space program we actually had, where hundreds of billions of dollars were pumped into a program that could just barely work to get 2 guys to the moon and back was nothing like this. And the failure isn’t due to a failure of nerve, or a loss of national resolve, or the decline of western civilization, the failure is due to the fact that the laws of physics dictate that getting a capsule that can hold two people to the surface of the moon takes a skyscraper full of explosives, and you have to build a new skyscraper every trip.
We could go back to the moon, but we’re can’t go back science fiction style, we’d still have to build that skycraper full of explosives every time, and the cost might be lower as our engineering improves, but it’s not going to fall by orders of magnitude. The only thing that will make it possible is if our economy grows by orders of magnitude such that we can afford to spend hundreds of billions of dollars for fun, and not even notice the expense.