I don’t love the phrasing in the thread title, but I can’t quite figure out a better way to say it.
Elaborating:
What works of science fiction —books, movies, TV, whatever —take place in a future that’s closest to the time that they were created?
Example: Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949 and set in (drumroll!) 1984, so there’s a 35-year gap between creation and the depicted future.
Caveats:
SF set in the past or alternate present doesn’t count. I’m thinking of works set solidly in the future (based on when they were written), even if the goal wasn’t explicitly to predict the future.
The works don’t have to be hard SF.
Chronology is based on the main action of the work —in other words, original Star Trek isn’t “set” in the 1990s even though events from that decade are mentioned in the series.
Max Headroom was set “20 minutes into the future,” and very little in its short run was improbable in our world. Much of its dystopian humor has come to pass. And the remainder seems to be on the immediate horizon.
DC Comics’s "Atomic Knights series was published starting in 1960 and took place in 1992 (with the nuclear war that serves as the series’s background said to have occurred in 1986).
The first appearance of DC’s character Tommy Tomorrow was published in 1947 and took place over a three year span from 1954 to 1960. (Later appearances changed the character to being further in the future.)
Cyril Kornbluth’s “The Rocket of 1955” was published in 1939, so 16 years.
“It Can’t Happen Here” by Sinclair Lewis was written in 1935 and showed a future that began in 1936.
“The Golden Kazoo” by John G. Schneider was published in 1956 about the election campaign of 1964. (It is probably the most accurate bit of future extrapolation in the genre.)
Twelve Monkeys was released in 1995. Most of the film happens in 1996 even though there are scenes that take place about 30 years later and (briefly) in 1917.
Came to say Max Headroom, see that has already been taken care of.
While no date is specified, William Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy (really? that’s the name Wikipedia gives for it?) takes place barely into the future (much less than the Sprawl and Bridge trilogies.) Same goes for Charles Strosseses Halting State duology and Neal Stephenson’s Reamde.
A lot of films and books about nuclear war, impending nuclear war, and the aftermath of nuclear war are set in the near future. Most don’t mention specific dates though. The film On the Beach was released in 1959 and set in 1964. Seven Days in May was released in 1964 and set in the early 1970s.
Quantum Leap debuted in 1989 and the “present” where Sam comes from and where Al lives is supposed to be the mid-late 1990s, I think.
The various film adaptations of I am Legend are mostly set about 5 years after they were released. Omega Man (1977 - 1971 = 6 years), The Last Man on Earth (1968 - 1964 = 4 years), I am Legend (2012 - 2007 = 5 years). The novel was set about 20 years after it was published.
the movie Things to Come was made in 1936 and predicts events starting in 1939. It has a war between Britain and an un–named enemy (who is almost certainly Germany, from the things they say) fought with lots of tanks (which wells himself had partly predicted much earlier), so he got it pretty correct. London (the stupidly named “Everytown” in the film, which nonetheless features things that look an awful lot like London landmarks) gets pretty badly beaten up by aerial bombing. where wells failed was in predicting a war that lasted for decades, effectively destroying European civilization until it was rescued by the Technocrats.
This entire thread is a little odd. There are plenty of novels that start “today”, or even in the recent past, but are definitely science fiction, whether they extend to a Far Future or stay in the Near Future. How do you tell a Science Fiction novel set today from one set only a decade, or a year, or only a day in the future? How about a Science Fiction work set in the past?
Terminator 2 was released in 1991 but set in 1995, mainly (I gather) so a character who was conceived in the original 1984 movie could be a plausible 10 year-old, though that was offset by them casting a 14 year-old actor. There wasn’t anything particularly futuristic about the setting itself, indeed the video games shown at the mall arcade scene would have seemed borderline-outdated in 1995.
For plausible near-future projections, I nominate the 1987 British series Star Cops, set in 2027 when commercial exploitation of orbital and lunar space was fully underway. They didn’t invent or imply a gizmotronic artificial-gravity system, nor anything else that would strain our understanding of physics.