4 times science fiction predicted the future


If you thought it wasn’t possible to foresee the future, you might want to reconsider. For years, people have been using sci-fi stories to make predictions of what’s to come, and a lot of them have turned out to be true. Their forecasts for the future have been as precise as those from The Simpsons; a show which has been able to make predictions with disturbing accuracy. So, which of these fictional stories have managed to shape the world we live in now?

4 times science fiction predicted the future

George Orwell’s 1984

Anyone who’s ever read George Orwell’s 1984 will probably be glad that the world of the novel is nothing but fiction. However, not every element of this iconic tale is a piece of fantasy. We may not have things like the thought police, but a lot of what we do is monitored nowadays. CCTV cameras are everywhere, and they watch us just like they do in the book.

While it may have taken until after 1984 for this grim future to be realized, our world is becoming more Orwellian by the day. Let’s hope this is where it stops.

Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward

It’s incredible to think that a novel written more than a century ago could be so closely aligned with the world we live in today. However, despite being penned in 1887, Edward Bellamy gave a remarkable prediction about the rise of credit cards in his book, Looking Backward.

The concept of using cards in place of money didn’t exist back in the 1800s, but Bellamy predicted a future where they’d be all the rage. What’s more, his novel was set in 2000, by which point a lot of people were definitely using them in real life. Clearly, this man knew where everyone was headed before the rest of the world did.

Ray Bradbury’s The Pedestrian

Self-driving cars might not be the norm right now, but we know for a fact that they’re in the works. For a long time, they’ve been included in people’s visions for the future, but it was Ray Bradbury who first popularised the idea. He wrote about them in his 1951 novel The Pedestrian, and since then everyone seems to have copied his prediction. We have to wonder if he’s the reason why work on self-driving cars started in the first place.

4 times science fiction predicted the future

Hugo Gernsback’s 124C 41+

It’s now easier than ever to communicate with people long distance thanks to things like telephones and video calls. The latter is still a relatively new concept, but it was actually predicted as far back as the early 1900s. Hugo Gernsback’s 124C 41+, which was published in 1911, talked of a future where people communicated with one another through video screens. That sounds a lot like Skype and Facetime, doesn’t it?

It seems that Gernsback had a knack for predicting the future. In addition to writing about video calls, he also mentioned things like television and air conditioning? Are we sure he wasn’t actually a time traveler?

Given how much has been predicted already, we have to wonder how many more sci-fi novels will become accurate visions of the future.

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