Welcome back to Book Break! In today's video we are talking about classic books that eerily
predicted the future. And this month Macmillan Collector’s Library published new editions of a
bunch of George Orwell's books so I thought that was a pretty perfect place to start,
the most obvious first one to start with being 1984. So this book was written in 1948 and depicts
a dystopian future where society is controlled through technology, surveillance and propaganda,
and it pretty accurately depicted quite a lot of the technology that we have now. In 1984
they have telescreens that can broadcast messages from the government directly into people's homes,
but can also capture video and identify faces and facial expressions. They also have devices that
can hear speech and transcribe it - all technology that we know pretty well. Even more scarily,
in 1984 George Orwell predicted the existence of Newspeak, which is a language created with the
express purpose of making people fall in line and think a certain way. And while today we haven't
gone quite as far as creating a whole new language you definitely do see certain ways of phrasing
things in the media that encourage people to all think a certain way. So for example only calling
attention to religion when reporting a crime if the perpetrator is Muslim, and therefore creating
a link in people's minds with being Muslim and being dangerous. Another Orwell book, Animal Farm,
is also said to have predicted the future pretty scarily accurately. So Animal Farm is set
on a farm where the animals rebel against the humans and fight for equal rights for all animals,
but ultimately by the end of the book they find themselves back in the same position,
but this time under the dictatorship of a pig called Napoleon. So pretty nonsensical
statements like “all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others” wouldn't sound
totally out of place coming out of the mouth of a certain soon-to-be ex-President. Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley was written even earlier, in 1931. So this one depicts a utopian future where
everyone is perfectly happy all the time, except this is only achieved by taking away people's free
will through genetic engineering, keeping them endlessly entertained and distracted,
and if all else fails giving them drugs to make them happy. And so much of this has come true.
Prenatal screening can allow parents to influence the genetic makeup of their children, endless
distractions do follow us everywhere on our phones, which most of us now can't even go more
than half an hour without looking at and which might actually be changing our brain structure,
and we do have drugs that can influence people's moods - which can be a very good thing as long
as it's not used to excess, which unfortunately it often is. So there is a lot in there that you will
recognize in our current world. Quite similarly to the 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. In
that book people have fallen totally out of touch with each other, spending more time listening to
their seashells and thimble radios than actually talking to each other - which again you might
recognize at social gatherings now (or at least when we were allowed social gatherings) you'll so
often see people looking at their phones instead of talking to each other. There's a very specific
prediction in the book Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler. So that book was published in
1998, it's a modern classic along with Parable of the Sower which is the first in the series.
Both of those books make a lot of very accurate predictions about a dystopian future wrecked
by climate change and wealth inequality, but probably the most specific comes in Parable of
the Talents which depicts a power-hungry President running under the slogan Make America Great Again.
Another one from 1998 is Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson which is about a walled off
inner city filled with crime and poverty and drug addiction. People with money flee the city for the
suburbs and so conditions just worsen and worsen, being largely ignored by politicians. So the city
in this book was inspired by Detroit but it was written 15 years before a political candidate from
a wealthy suburb outside Detroit actually did call for a wall to be built along the city's border.
And they just keep getting more and more specific. So in 1898 an author called Morgan Robertson
wrote a book called Futility, or The Wreck of the Titan. This one was about an apparently
unsinkable ocean liner which struck an iceberg in the north Atlantic one April night and sank with
nowhere near enough lifeboats on board for all the passengers. Fourteen years later an unsinkable
ship called Titanic followed in its footsteps, striking an iceberg in the north Atlantic one
April night and sinking with nowhere near enough lifeboats on board. This was so accurate that
people actually thought that Morgan Robertson might have clairvoyant powers, which of course he
denied. All the way back in 1726 Jonathan Swift wrote in Gulliver's Travels about astronomers
discovering that Mars had two moons in its orbit almost a full 150 years before astronomers really
did discover that Mars had two moons in its orbit. In1905 Begum Rakeya predicted both solar power and
video calls in her book Sultana's dream, so that book is about a feminist utopia called Ladyland
where women run everything. Shame that bit hasn't come true yet! And crime is completely eliminated
because it was the men committing all the crimes in the first place. Video calls also feature
heavily in E.M. Forster's 1909 novella The Machine Stops, where the Earth's surface has been declared
uninhabitable, and so people are advised to stay inside. They work in underground cells
and they communicate to each other through video calls, they do all of their work that way
and slowly people begin to adjust to the new normal. Hello 2020. And talking of 2020 I had
to finish off with the book The Eyes of Darkness which was written by Dean Koontz in 1981. And a
lot of people have been pointing at this book as a prediction about Covid. So in Dean Koontz's book
there is a pandemic called Wuhan-400 because it originates in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
The pandemic in his book was even more terrifying though, because in his book anyone infected with
the virus would die within 24 hours. So thank goodness it hasn't all come true. There are so
many more examples like this, I would love to hear some of your favourites. Do leave a comment below
letting us know which books you've come across with creepily accurate predictions, and I will
also link here to a playlist of all of our other videos about classics. See you next time!