This isn’t sci-fi, but the Onion was eerily prophetic: Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’
The only thing we’re missing out on is Rollerball.
Then again, Mary Todd Lincoln had seances in the White House and FDR’s VP Henry Wallace was a Rosicrucian in search of the Reincarnate Christ in Tibet. Nancy Reagan was a piker when it comes to White House occultism.
My pick- the political program of PHILIP DRU: ADMINISTRATOR by Edward Mandell House.
There are serious proposals for this in the UK - the technology isn’t quite there but the intention and planning is well underway.
The initial goal is bus-stop adverts which will read info via bluetooth from your phone and ping up targeted ads and video content.
That could be embarrassing if you’re sitting at the bus stop and the speaker starts blaring out: HYPNO-TOAD! IT’S TIME TO REFILL YOUR PENISGRO PRESCRIPTION!
This isn’t a book or movie, but…
The radio-monitored ankle bracelet (Lindsey Lohan famously wore one recently) was first envisioned in the Amazing Spider-Man newspaper comic strip. The inventor actually cited that as his inspiration. I wish he’d made the web shooter instead, for cops who want to stop a fleeing suspect without actually shooting him.
Supposedly, they’re installing eye scanners throughout the city of Leon, Mexico.
Sounds like he’d heard of Rasputin to me.
I worked for a pharmaceutical company that was like a cyberpunk keiretsu. There is a local saying whose polite version is “when their CEO catches a cold, the majors of 24 towns sneeze”. The differences in benefits between their direct and indirect workers are huge; the whole area is divided in “their employees, their subcontractors, the people who live from servicing the other two”; many locals hate their guts. It’s hard to explain it in a few words, other than “keiretsu”. Officially, they’re not their own government, but they sure do their best to behave as if they were a real bad one, with as little regard for either laws or decency as possible.
Heinlein lived in California, and it’s quite possible that he used Nancy Reagan as his inspiration for that character. It’s just that she did indeed become the First Lady.
Just what I came in to post. If, indeed, this practice did take place in China and wasn’t just a media invention. If it was real, I wonder if it’s still going on?
A Great Britain with CCTV cameras in every public place and authorities with access to a powerful computer network that stores evey mintute detail of a person’s life?
No it isn’t. Remember “Escape From New York”, where in the near-future of 1996 crime in New York got so bad they just walled off the city and declared it a prison?
Yeah, me neither. The urban decay of the 70s and 80s has been reversed.
Remember when science fiction predicted that most people would be doped to the gills on mood-stabilizers, mind-numbers, happy pills, uppers, downers, and sidewaysers? The good thing is the real life drugs don’t have as awful of side-effects as the drugs in science fiction, and the government doesn’t add them to the water supply, people take them voluntarily.
Also, I would point to how Orwell’s ministries had the exact opposite purpose as their name, e.g. the Ministry of Truth was about creating propaganda and keeping the public fooled.
GWB’s contributions:
- Help America Vote Act (gave control of elections to Diebold)
- Patriot Act (took away civil liberties and constitutional rights)
- Free Speech Zones (where protesters were illegally imprisoned during rallies)
- No Child Left Behind Act (which actually served to permanently unbalance and destroy the education of an entire generation of underprivileged youth…one snippet: the answer to children not learning? Simple! Give them less days and fewer hours!)
We’ve had 8 years of Opposite Day.
You don’t have to use TV.
The Fifth Element, Deep Impact, and Head of State.
In the Book, The Demolished Man, the people spoke to each other using non-alphabetic characters (like the @ and & symbols). Leetspeak? Txtspeak?
Yeah, I remember that era. In particular, I remember a story by Norman Spinrad, I believe it was, where a woman was pregnant and consulting with a doctor as to which mood altering drugs she should take during pregnancy and which she should give the baby after birth.