When authors write about the future, they have to predict what technology and life might
be like decades down the road.
While the books are often written as a metaphor for their contemporary society, some authors
have made amazingly accurate predictions about what modern life has actually become.
These are all fiction books that, somehow, managed to predict the future.
10.
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
By Horace McCoy
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is a relentlessly bleak book that was published in 1935.
It’s about a young man named Robert who moves to Los Angeles to get into the film
industry.
When Robert tries to get work as an extra on a movie, he meets Gloria, a young woman
who wants to be an actress.
After failing to get jobs, they decide to join a dance marathon.
The problem is that these marathons are death marches that can go on for weeks.
The only breaks that the contestants get are 10 minute time-outs after an hour and fifty
minutes of dancing.
The couple that lasts the longest gets $1,000, and all the contestants are fed.
Throughout the contest, new gimmicks are added to liven up the marathon.
Like at the end of the night, there’s a speed walk and the couple that comes in last
is eliminated.
Another twist that is added to the marathon is two contestants get married, and are saved
from elimination.
Other times, celebrities show up at the marathon for cameos.
Published in the mid-1930s, They Shoot Horses was written as a metaphor of the plight of
people during the Great Depression.
However, today it can be seen as a frightfully accurate precursor to reality TV shows.
In reality shows, people voluntarily do things that are physically and mentally grueling
and/or humiliating, all for money and their 15 minutes of fame.
Reality shows are also known for using gimmicks to make the show more exciting.
Finally, celebrities of varying degrees of fame are known to pop up on all types of reality
shows, from Big Brother to MasterChef.
The question is, is a grueling dance marathon any more dehumanizing than making someone
eat something like horse rectum or blended rats, like some contestants on Fear Factor
had to do?
9.
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Infinite Jest is a long and unwieldy book; the story is nearly a thousand pages and there
are over 100 pages of footnotes.
It’s believed that the book takes place around 2009, in an alternate timeline where
the years aren’t numbered.
Instead, they are sponsored by companies.
For example, there is the Year of the Whopper and the Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment.
Due to the scope of the book, the plot is impossible to summarize in a few sentences,
but it’s mostly set at a tennis academy and a halfway house for addicts.
Both are in Boston, which is part of the Organization of North American Nations, or O.N.A.N.
In this reality, the United States forced Canada and Mexico to join America as one big
super state.
There are several groups of characters in the book and some of those people are looking
for a lost film called “Entertainment.”
The film is supposedly so entertaining that if someone starts to watch it, they can’t
stop.
They will do nothing else but watch the film.
This includes stopping eating and drinking, and eventually, they will die while watching
it.
In many ways, Wallace’s novel predicted contemporary life fairly accurately.
Most notably, he predicted the way people would consume media and their obsession with
entertainment.
In the book, people watch teleputers, which are combinations of televisions, phones, and
computers.
People can get movies and TV shows off the InterLace to watch whenever they want, and
then they listen to their teleputers with white ear plugs.
Of course, all of those inventions are now commonplace, albeit not exactly the way that
Wallace envisioned it.
Teleputers sound a lot like smart phones, Wallace just didn’t predict that they would
be mobile and fit in the palm of your hand, while the InterLace is a lot like Netflix.
However, Wallace thought that a system like the Interlace would be the death of TV advertising.
Finally, the earplugs are, of course, Apple’s earbuds.
Wallace also wrote about video phones, which had been predicted by many other writers before
him, but Wallace had an interesting insight.
In Infinite Jest, videophones were just a fad because people don’t like seeing themselves
on the screen.
In real life, there are many reasons people don’t use video chat as frequently as texting.
One reason is that people don’t like seeing pictures of themselves.
Finally, Wallace predicted the rise of Donald Trump.
In his book, the President is the loudest and brashest right wing sensationalist of
the mid-1990s – Rush Limbaugh.
8.
Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke
Childhood’s End, by famed sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke, is
about an invasion of Earth by a group of aliens called the Overlords.
The Overlords aren’t violent, but they hide themselves from human eyes.
Through a spokesperson at the United Nations, they say that they will reveal themselves
to humankind in 50 years.
During those 50 years, the Overlords improve life on Earth in many ways – ignorance,
poverty, hunger, and disease are all things of the past.
Of course, the Overlords also help advance human technology.
One of those technologies was a type of virtual reality that is like a movie, but it is so
realistic that you can’t tell the difference between the movie and real life.
“The program,” as Clarke called it, would appeal to all the senses and would allow the
person to be someone completely different from themselves, or even a plant.
Why someone would want to be a plant is beyond us, but that isn’t the only head scratching
prediction Clarke made.
He also predicted that in the early 2000s, people might watch TV for three hours a day.
The only way someone would be able to watch all the programming would be to never sleep,
as opposed to it being impossible.
So while Clarke didn’t foresee cable TV or YouTube, he did correctly predict video
games and virtual reality.
This is pretty impressive considering that when the book was published in 1953, televisions
in homes were just becoming common.
7.
The Plot Against America by Phillip Roth
In Phillip Roth’s 2004 book, The Plot Against America, a well-known celebrity gets into
politics and starts to spew conspiracy theories about minorities.
Finding his niche, the celebrity, with no political experience, panders to racists and
anti-Semites.
Surprisingly, he wins the nomination of the Republican Party and then goes on to win the
presidency.
As president, he aligns himself with a notorious and brutal world leader and this creates global
tension and conflict.
He also begins to persecute the minorities that he villainized in his campaign.
The Plot Against America takes place in an alternate timeline and it starts in 1940.
The celebrity who is running for president is Charles Lindbergh, who uses a platform
rife with anti-Semitism to become president.
After he’s elected, the world leader that Lindbergh associates himself with is Adolf
Hitler.
Of course, the parallels in Roth’s book to real life should be obvious to anyone who
wasn’t living under a rock in 2016.
But if you were in a coma or something, let us fill you in.
Celebrity real estate mogul Donald Trump ran for the Republican ticket with no political
experience.
His platform included racist conspiracy theories and he spouted offensive rhetoric about minorities.
He found popularity among white nationalists and people who were anti-immigration and then
shamelessly pandered to them.
Amazingly, he not only won the Republican nomination, but he went on to win the presidency.
So far, as president, Trump has alienated several of America’s allies, but talks glowingly
about Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose government
has a horrendous record of human rights violations, which includes state-sponsored human trafficking.
The final similarity between President Trump and President Lindbergh is that after Trump
became President, he started to persecute those he villainized in his campaign, specifically
Muslims and undocumented immigrants.
6.
Neuromancer by William Gibson
William Gibson’s 1984 novel, Neuromancer, not only gave birth to the cyberpunk genre,
but it also predicted cyberspace and the internet.
The book follows Case, a former computer hacker and drug addict.
Before the book starts, Case was fired from his job and his central nervous system was
poisoned, so he couldn’t “jack in” to cyberspace, which is called “the matrix.”
Millions of people can jack into the matrix, which is a 3D virtual world that appeals to
all the senses.
One day, Case meets a mysterious employer who says he will help Case get back into the
matrix, but in exchange, Case has to complete an incredibly difficult hack.
In 1984, there was an internet, but only a handful of universities used it.
Gibson foresaw that it would eventually connect millions of computers.
Of course, the internet isn’t as immersive as the matrix Gibson predicted (yet) but he
did predict the rise of technological addiction and people’s need to be online.
5.
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut’s debut novel, Player Piano, was published in 1952, and it takes place
in the near future, 10 years after the Third World War.
Since people were needed to fight the war, factories were designed to be more autonomous.
Also, the stock market is controlled by a computer that tells the factories how many
products the world needs.
Unfortunately, this automation leads to massive unemployment.
Only managers and engineers, who have doctorates, are employed and everyone else can either
join the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps, where they do meaningless work like fill potholes,
or they can join the army.
However, being in the army has kind of lost its meaning as well, because there is nothing
to fight for.
Essentially, Player Piano is about how automation could make life purposeless for many people.
Of course, we are a long way from the world of Player Piano, but Vonnegut did correctly
predict the rise of automation in society, and that it would cause people to lose their
jobs.
Many people have blamed these job losses on China, or immigrants, but that isn’t exactly
the case.
Since 2000, America has lost 5 million manufacturing jobs, but American manufacturing output has
increased during that time; meaning the jobs are being lost to computers and robots, not
to other countries or people.
We’re seeing automation take over jobs more and more every day.
Just a few examples include with self-checkout lanes at the grocery store or McDonald’s
automated menus.
In the future, more jobs are expected to be lost to automation.
Drones are already being tested for deliveries by companies like Amazon.
Notably, by 2020, self-driving cars are expected to be the norm and this will eliminate all
driving jobs.
It is expected to get so bad that, over the next 20 years in a country like Canada, four
out of 10 jobs will be lost to automation.
So what do you want to do?
Join the army or the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps?
4.
Earth by David Brin
David Brin is best known for writing the book The Postman, which was made into one of Kevin
Costner’s worst movies (and that is saying something).
In 1989, Brin published the novel Earth, which takes place in the year 2038.
While the novel does have a plot, the book is more or less Brin’s predictions about
the future.
If you’re curious what the plot is, it’s that an artificial black hole has fallen into
the Earth’s core.
Scientists have a year to fix it, or the Earth may be destroyed.
The book has a large cast of characters and through these characters, Brin explores what
life might be like in the future.
Currently, there is a website that keeps track of his predictions, and there are 14 predictions
confirmed to have come true and another eight that are likely.
Some of the predictions that Brin did get right are global warming, rising sea levels,
and the breaking of the levees on the Mississippi River.
Another natural disaster that is postulated in the book that came true was the Fukushima
Nuclear Disaster.
In 1990, people knew about the internet, but Brin accurately predicted the World Wide Web
that was invented by Tim Berners-Lee a year after the book was published.
On the “net,” as Brin calls it, there are pages full of hyperlinks.
Brin also thought that the net would be used by major news outlets and citizen reporters,
along with everyday people who wanted to express themselves.
Finally, he also foresaw spam and Trojan horse viruses.
At the time of this list, Brin still has about 21 years to be proven right on the rest of
his predictions.
So far, only one prediction from his book has been disproven.
In Earth, the characters haven’t discovered any Earth-like planets and they didn’t think
they would be found any time soon.
In reality, we have found several Earth-like planets that are in habitable zones around
their star.
The first was Kepler-186f; its discovery was announced by NASA in 2014.
3.
The World Set Free by H.G. Wells
In The World Set Free, H.G. Wells predicted atomic bombs, even going as far to use the
term “atomic bomb” in his book.
His bombs are uranium-based and they are about the size of an orange.
The explosion is caused by the splitting of atoms and after the explosion, there is corrosive
radiation left over.
What is so impressive about this is that Wells wrote the book in 1913, 32 years before the
first nuclear bomb was tested.
The World Set Free also has an interesting role in the technology it predicted – it
helped inspire its invention.
In 1932, English scientists had successfully split an atom through artificial means and
the experiment didn’t show any evidence that splitting an atom would cause a huge
release of energy.
Later that year, Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard read The World Set Free and thought that Wells
was correct.
Splitting an atom would probably release a lot of energy; the question was how to split
the atom.
A year later, he had a eureka moment.
Szilard said, “It suddenly occurred to me that if we could find an element which is
split by neutrons and which would emit two neutrons when it absorbed one neutron, such
an element, if assembled in sufficiently large mass, could sustain a nuclear chain reaction.”
Szilard patented the idea in 1933, but he was disturbed by The World Set Free.
He didn’t want the patent to become public because it might fall into the wrong hands.
Something else that worried him was the rise of Nazism.
So in 1939, he drafted the letter that was sent by Albert Einstein to Franklin Roosevelt,
saying that Germany was stockpiling uranium.
This letter, in turn, gave birth to the Manhattan Project.
Szilard and some British scientists worked with the Americans, and this eventually led
to the first nuclear bombs.
Two of those bombs were dropped on Japan in August 1945 at the tail end of World War II.
Wells died in 1946, after having seen the weapon that he warned against used on civilians
in a war.
2.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Yeah, you knew this one was coming.
Published in 1935, Brave New World takes place in the year 632 A.F., which is actually 2540
A.D.
(A.F.
stands for After Ford, as in the industrialist Henry Ford).
In the future, babies are born in labs, meaning the family unit is dead.
When they are children, they are told in whispers while they sleep to buy things and to love
consumer products.
When they are older, the state demands that they be sexually promiscuous, and women wear
their birth control on their belts.
No one has any real worries about life because mood enhancing drugs are widely available
and its usage is encouraged.
Of course, contemporary society isn’t quite to the point of Brave New World, but in all
fairness to its author, Aldous Huxley, we still have over 520 years to go.
However, he did accurately depict several aspects of contemporary culture, including
our consumerist-heavy society.
He also predicted antidepressants and their prevalence in modern society.
What’s interesting about Brave New World‘s relationship to contemporary society, is that
in 1985, writer and media critic Neil Postman published the non-fiction book Amusing Ourselves
to Death.
In the book, Postman accurately predicts the rise of a candidate like Donald Trump and
the prevalence of fake news in society.
In the introduction of the book, Postman explains that he got the idea in 1984, when he was
participating in a panel on parallels between George Orwell’s 1984 and real life in 1984.
What Postman realized is that modern life is becoming more like Brave New World than
1984.
Postman wrote:
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books.
What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be
no one who wanted to read one.
Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information.
Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and
egoism.
Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us.
Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
Orwell feared we would become a captive culture.
Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.”
Essentially, what Postman says Huxley was warning us against is the dangers of being
oppressed by our own amusement; meaning we use endless streams of entertainment to distract
ourselves and fail to engage with real life.
1.
Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
Stand on Zanzibar is probably the least well known book on the list, but it is the most
accurate prediction of what life would be like in the future.
The book, which was written in 1968, follows a large cast of characters, but many chapters
are backstory and information about the world of 2010.
According to the website The Millions, there are at least 17 amazingly accurate predictions
that Brunner makes about 2010 in Stand on Zanzibar.
In the book, a major problem in society is that individuals are committing random acts
of violence, often at schools.
Terrorists also threaten American interests and attack American buildings.
Between 1960 and 2010, Brunner predicted that prices would increase six fold because of
inflation; it actually increased sevenfold.
America’s biggest rival is China, and not the Soviet Union.
It’s also a different dynamic because instead of warfare or a weapons race, the competition
is seen in economics, trade, and technology.
As for the rest of the world, the countries of Europe have formed into one union.
Britain is part of it, but they tend to side with the United States, while the other European
countries are critical of American actions.
Africa is behind the rest of the world, while Israel’s existence is still a source of
tension in the Middle East.
When it comes to the lives of everyday people, marriage still happens but young people prefer
to have short-term relationships instead of committing to someone long-term.
Society is also much more liberal.
Homosexuality and bisexuality is accepted.
Black people are in a better position in society, but racial tension is still prevalent.
When it comes to technology, Brin predicted that cars would run on electric fuel cells.
Honda and General Motors are the two biggest manufacturers.
And even though General Motors is a Detroit based company, Detroit is a rundown ghost
town, but they have a unique techno music scene, which really did emerge in the 1990s.
TV channels are played all over the world thanks to satellites and the TV system allows
people to watch shows on their own schedule.
Inflight entertainment on planes is in the back of the seats and they feature videos
and news.
Also, in the book the characters can phone each other on video screens, but instead of
a picture of themselves, they use avatars, which can look like the caller or someone
completely different.
There are also laser printers, which print documents.
Pharmaceuticals are used to help sexual performance, and they are advertised.
Due to a societal and political backlash, tobacco has been marginalized and marijuana
has become decriminalized.
Finally, the President of the United States is President Obomi, which is an amazing fluke
or actual evidence that Brunner somehow saw or experienced 2010.
In all, Stand on Zanzibar is a pretty remarkable vision of the future.
Unfortunately, the author, John Brunner, did not get to see many of his predictions come
true – he died in 1995 at the age of 60.