What is the most prescient sci fi?

I don't know if I've even seen "Johnny Mnemonic". Did it precede the internet or its popularity? I ask because I worked at a video store during the advent of the internet in like 1998 or so when everyone began to carry cellular phones and emailing and having an ISP at home. I seem to remember that title being on the shelves.

My easy go-to favorite is the Fifth Element, but I don't think it's predictive of our societal direction - it's set in the distant future, with flying cars and space ships.

I don't remember the details of minority report, but I have seen that one. I can't think of any science fiction that I think was really accurate, but Orwell's "1984" comes to mind frequently; though I haven't actually read it!

Maybe the film "Hackers", but it wasn't really set in the future, and it's more just tech than sci-fi. Sorry. I can't think of one.

 

THX-1138 after the coming chaos. Those who control will be on the surface. The ones left will be below , with the mandatory , properly administrated drugs ,maintaining power for the privileged surface dwellers. Most of the population will have been eliminated. BLESSING OF THE MASSES BE UPON YOU. AND REMEMBER-BUY MORE. BUY MORE NOW."


I'm thinking 1984 is here now.

 

You might laugh but I want to say Star Trek.
Flip phones, wireless headsets, virtual reality, artificial intelligence,
and every time I open the microwave to take food out I think of their replicators.
3D printing, and medical stuff like the biobeds and whatever that thing was called that got passed over a patient's body by Bones.
I bet they'll have those soon

Computers you activate by speaking to them.

Remember how funny it was in Star Trek 4 when Scotty picked up the computer mouse and said into it "hello computer"?
Not quite so funny now.
Thanks to Bilby for the gift of the gif!

 

Fantastic Voyage 1966




52 years later

v​

Nanobots technology February 2018



To test their nanorobots, the researchers injected them into mice infected with human breast cancer cells and human ovarian cancer cells as well as mouse models of human melanoma and lung cancer. In each case, the nanorobots extended the life of the mice and slowed or reversed tumor growth.

Feb 12, 2018

 

Animal Farm and 1984 come to mind immediately and seem oddly appropriate given the world as it is today in November 2020. Also, Player Piano by Kurt Vonegut was quite prescient in predicting radar ovens (microwaves) and moulded plastic houses, which are just beginning to come to being now thanks to 3d printing technology. His book also satirised social thinking in the machine age, and how those made redundant by machines all thought they'd make a fortune by working from home to make luxury or novelty items.

Other than that, I agree Star Trek was good in some ways, as have been a host of other films and TV programmes for odd items that do now exist, but which didn't at the time. I watched Back to the Future Part 2 last night, which was filmed around or soon after 1985, and they had large flat screen smart TVs shown as existing in 2015, which as we know they now do. Furthermore Marty McFly spoke to one to order it to show something, which we would now tell Alexa to do.

The one thing I've never come across in any sci fi book, film or TV series is the smart phone and social media phenomenon and I think that's a blindness that seems to have remained right up till it actually happened and swamped us all.

 

I mean, that's hard to say. No one really knows the future (Bruce Sterling says good sci-fi is taking things not one or two but three steps past where you think they'll go). So, long story short: I don't know. lol. Schismatrix is a great book, though and filled with cool lines. See, also: Tomorrow Now, by Sterling to see him riff, with mixed results, about various aspect of the future he sees changing. He's "a futurist", so...ya know...an expert an all! lol

 

In my last post I forgot to mention the I Robot stories by Isaac Asimov. One thing struck me as very prescient when I read them was the use of positronic electronics to join two people together in a virtual shared environment when they were hundreds of miles apart. I think it was R Daneel Olivaw (a very advanced and human looking android/robot) who operated the machinery that allowed a detective to speak face to face with several suspects in a murder case, even though each one of them was in their own home and a long way from where the detective was.

The description of the face to face sessions mirrored almost exactly the kind of interaction we now see on a day to day basis where two rooms have almost identical long tables in them, and through the use of webcams and large monitors mounted at one end of each table, a meeting between two teams can take place as though all the members were sitting at the same table.

In the story I read the detective interviews a female suspect. He is in one room and she is in an almost identical one, and by using a whole wall as the monitor, it appears to anyone watching that both people are in different halves of the same room. The female suspect flits around her room (which is her bedroom) almost naked, safe in the knowledge that although the detective can see her, he can't get to her at all. So she spends the whole interview teasing him with flashes of her charms. This in a way is the same as sex play via web cams that we see today, particularly since lockdown and the enforced separation of couples. In that respect the stories were very prescient as they were written between 1940 and 1950.

 

I gotta say this. There are even needle-less injections developed!

I think a lot of modern developments are inspired by science fiction and thus becomes reality.

 

Back in the 80s, every little girl wanted a Cabbage Patch doll.
They had a talking version.
My daughter had one, as did a neighbor girl.
Two dolls in the same room would carry on a conversation that made sense.
That was amazing at the time.
Some people believed the dolls possessed!
How times change.

 

according to this Scientists Say There's A 50/50 Chance We're Living In A Matrix-Style Simulation (wegotthiscovered.com)

Its The Matrix

 

I don't know if it fits prescient, or even "sci-fi", but "Minority Report" comes to mind somehow.



see! he's got a touch-screen.

 

woop... did not realize.

 

What if science fiction is starting to become science fact?

 

The scene in Robocop (1987) when the villain holds up a device that looks like a smartphone running a tracking app.

https://picturesup.typepad.com/.a/6a01348660b2b3970c014e5f80ad90970c-800wi

Of course, the very next minute he takes a call on the 80s phone planted on his desk. I can't help but wonder if Steve Jobs sat there thinking, "Why didn't he just take the call on that cool device he was already holding in his hand?"