The talent of a real science fiction writer is not only to come up with an interesting plot, but also to literally foresee the future. Many of the things that the authors described in the past and even the century before last at that time seemed incredible, but for you and me they are everyday.
It is all the more difficult to understand how these people could describe the Internet or the atomic bomb long before they were created. Today we will talk about 10 things whose appearance was predicted by famous science fiction writers.
10. Video calls - Hugo Gernsbeck "Ralph 124C 41+" | 1911
On the Internet, there is now an opinion that the appearance of video calls was predicted by Robert Zemeckis in the second part of "Back to the Future", but in fact it was done long before him. The name of this seer is Hugo Gernsbek, and he did this more than a century ago.
On the cover of his novel "Ralph 124C 41+" he placed a device with which the heroine not only called, but could see the interlocutor during a conversation. For 1911, such a device was something out of the ordinary, but for us, nothing special.
9. Antidepressants - Aldous Huxley's “Oh Brave New World” | 1932
In his dystopia, Aldous Huxley describes a world in which people take pills - catfish, uplifting. Now they are called antidepressants, but the essence of this does not change in any way.
In the 30s of the last century, the pharmaceutical industry was not developed so much, because only 4 years have passed since the discovery of penicillin, so readers could not imagine that once “catfish” would be sold in every pharmacy.
8. Credit Cards and Supermarkets - Edward Bellamy A Look Back | 1888
Credit cards and supermarkets are very close things, because cards are most often used just in supermarkets, so we put them together. Moreover, for the first time they are mentioned in one work. When Edward Bellamy wrote his novel, no one had any idea about such things, but they were real in the world he had invented.
He described the year 2000, but technological progress was ahead of his imagination, since the first credit cards appeared in 1962. However, it was at zero that they became the most popular and began to crowd out cash, so to some extent he guessed over time.
7. Headphones and Plasma TVs - Ray Bradbury “451 degrees Fahrenheit” | 1953
Another “double” prediction belongs to Ray Bradbury, who in his most famous novel described a world without books, but with incredible technology by the standards of the 1950s.
The protagonist’s wife was obsessed with talk shows, which she watched on huge screens that acted as walls, and constantly wore “shells” in her ears - a prototype of modern in-ear headphones.
The first real devices were created only after a quarter of a century, and the author saw this, since he had lived until 2012. Unlike Guernsback or Bellamy, Bradbury himself watched his ideas become reality.
By the way, in the same novel, he described a device that closely resembles modern ATMs.
6. E-book - Douglas Adams "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" | 1979
Although this idea of the writer was ahead of time, it was not much: the prototype of the electronic book was created in the mid-90s, and mass production began at the end of the decade. Adams told Neil Gaiman about his idea, with whom he spoke closely.
Gaiman, after listening to him, said that the appearance of such devices would be a sentence for printed literature, but Adams did not agree. He set as an example sharks that lived long before dinosaurs, but despite the emergence of a more developed species, they continued to exist even after their extinction.
As we can see, he turned out to be completely right: the electronics became commonplace, but paper books did not disappear from the shelves.
5. Bionic prostheses - Martin Kaydin "Cyborg" | 1972
In his work, Martin Caydin describes a man whose limbs and even his eyes were replaced with mechanical prostheses after an injury. Now this idea is still exploited by science fiction writers (remember at least the films “I, Robot” or “Robocop”), but real prostheses are also widespread. The first was created more than 40 years after the release of the book.
4. Atomic Bomb - Herbert Wells “The Liberated World” | 1914
Herbert Wells can be called the person who predicted the most inventions: here, and a VCR, and a laser, and a slow cooker, and a flight to the moon, and dozens more things.
We isolated the nuclear bomb only because it became the most terrible thing, the appearance of which he described in the pages of his books, although he could not imagine the whole scale: the bombs he described had negligible power compared to those that mankind had invented.
3. 3D projector - Frank Herbert Dune | 1965
Three-dimensional projectors cannot be called everyday, as the technology is still far from perfect and few can afford such a toy, but it still exists. And in 1965, when Herbert wrote his cult novel, such a technology seemed unattainable, since then ordinary projectors only came to the masses and no one had any idea about 3D.
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This author cannot be called a classic science fiction writer, as he tried himself in different genres, but when he took on the description of the world of the future, he managed to get goosebumps reliably. In a short story in 1904, he described a teleelectroscope - a system with which people can exchange information and track the lives of others even if they live in different cities and countries. Now we call it the Internet and social networks.
By the way, Twain also came up with fingerprinting - in his book Life on the Mississippi, a criminal is searched for using fingerprints, although such a methodology was still 10 years old.
1. Mobile phone - Alexander Belyaev “The fight on the air” | 1927
The writer is not in vain called the "Russian Jules Verne": he made a huge contribution to the development of not only domestic but also world literature. The most famous of his "prophecies" is the appearance of a mobile phone, although in other works the author talked about plastic surgery, anticipating its development, scuba gear and drones, and many more things that appeared after his death.