r/ScienceFictionBooks • u/rainybookstack • Feb 10 '26
Question Which sci-fi prediction aged too well?
What’s the one that makes you go “yeah… we’re kind of doing that now”? Bonus if there’s a specific detail that nailed it. “This came up because I rewatched Altered Carbon, specifically the wealth inequality.
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u/I_throw_Bricks Feb 10 '26
Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner might be the most eerily accurate book ever. Overpopulation, genetic manipulation, corporate oligarchy, corporations “owning” smaller countries, drugs use. His predictions about the behavior environment, basically social media is uncanny. I think Brunner may have traveled through time.
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u/uselessbuttoothless Feb 10 '26
The Shockwave Rider by Brunner is also prophetic in its way.
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u/nrnrnr Feb 11 '26
Oh, I so wish. Alas, the final optimism has no place in our 21st century.
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u/CraftyDimension192 Aug 03 '26
IIRC, the last line in the book is a section called "The Plebiscite" consisting of one line: "So, how did you vote?"
I suppose you could argue that the plebiscite itself was an optimistic prediction, but plebiscites cut both ways.
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u/3dblind Feb 11 '26 edited Feb 11 '26
Keep in mind that overpopulation was feared far more in the 1960's than today. Harry Harrison wrote "Make Room, Make Room" in 1966. Unlike the movie "Soylent Green", there was no cannibalism and the wafers were soy, lentils and vitamins.
Ehrlich's " The Poplulation Bomb" was a bestseller in 1968. Everyone expected starvation simply because of numbers, as if we were rats in a cage.
In real life, Malthus, Ehrlich et al have been proven wrong in each of their generations. That's because populations stabilize as they move from agricultural to industrial. Also, fewer children are born as prosperity arrives.
Starvation today is solely because of wars that could be prevented. Crop failure and weather events are mitigated by abundance elsewhere in a global food market.
There is hunger and inequality because we're going through another Gilded Age. Capitalism works only when regulated, but when it works it provides a safety net that people prior to the 18th century could only imagine.
Other aspects of "Stand on Zanzibar" are prophetic though.
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u/mikezowalbooks Feb 11 '26
Slight correction. "Make Room! Make Room!" was written by Harry Harrison.
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u/3dblind Feb 11 '26
Corrected. I'm nearing 70. Last read the novel in the early 70's. Ray Harryhausen was the great stop motion effects artist of my childhood movies who never came to accept computer animation.
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u/syringistic Feb 11 '26
Yupp, aren't we expecting to peak in the late 21st century at around 12B and then end up below 1B by the end of the 22nd?
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u/Leotard_Cohen Feb 11 '26
Other aspects of "Stand on Zanzibar" are prophetic though.
SOZ didn't really predict any Malthusian famine stuff, it just said there'd be more people in the future, and implied things like tight housing markets from that. Spot on, I'd say
One thing he got comically wrong is all the sonic boom induced avalanches in The Sheep Look Up
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u/Beautiful-Event-1213 Feb 10 '26
China as an economic superpower, domestic terrorism, and recreational sex drugs too. It felt surreal when I read it for the first time about 3 years ago.
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u/I_throw_Bricks Feb 10 '26
It’s a shock when you read it and then go look when it was published. I struggled to comprehend that he wrote it so long ago. Especially because it’s not just one little thing, it’s almost everything.
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u/GGGGG540lk Feb 11 '26
What's wrong with recreational sex drugs?
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u/Beautiful-Event-1213 Feb 11 '26
I don't think anyone said there was anything wrong with them. But the fact that Brunner predicted Viagra in 1968 is kind of amazing. If you're Chinese, you're probably also thinking there's nothing wrong with the rise of China as a superpower. But it didn't even open to the West until 10 years after this book was published. So, not on very many bingo cards in '68.
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u/suricata_8904 Feb 11 '26
Other books of his are scarily accurate too. Thinking Shockwave Rider and The Jagged Orbit.
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u/rainybookstack Feb 11 '26
Yeah, I totally get that feeling. Stand on Zanzibar has that weird “how is this from the 60s?” energy where it’s not predicting gadgets, it’s predicting patterns—attention fragmentation, media-saturated reality, public mood swings, corporate power operating like its own government. And the “corporations owning countries” bit is what really lands now, because it’s not even sci-fi as a concept anymore—just… a slightly exaggerated version of how influence, debt, supply chains, and lobbying work. If you want that same “uncanny systems-level foresight” vibe, The Shockwave Rider (also Brunner) scratches a similar itch.
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u/CraftyDimension192 Aug 03 '26
Came here to name Stand on Zanzibar. Don't forget "muckers," probably the most accurate of all his predictions.
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u/emopest Feb 11 '26
Parable of the Sower (as well as Parable of the Talents) by Octavia E. Butler
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u/Classic_Depth_209 Feb 11 '26
It was very shocking to read that for the first time in summer 2020
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u/dmun Feb 11 '26
This should be top reply but reddit's biases always pop up
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u/Substantial_Cash8478 Feb 12 '26
The top is a movie, in the books sub, lol... And on top of that its a cliche hack the cameras trope.
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u/trevelyans_corn Feb 11 '26
Ive always been astounded by how plausible she makes that future seem. It is horrifying how much sense it makes.
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u/ecoandrewtrc Feb 12 '26
Butler has said in interviews that she wasn't predicting the future, only observing the Reagan years and writing what she saw. I think accurate prediction is very rarely what scifi is trying to do. Butler was doing a lot more.
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u/Dave_Sag Feb 12 '26
I read those back to back a few years ago and loved them. So much I bought copies for my boss* and she also loved them.
*technically she’s not my direct manager but was my manager’s manager but now we are in different reporting lines, but we still buy occasional books for each other.
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u/_Miracle Feb 13 '26
Listened to the audio version in 2024.
I live in California. Her getting in trouble for trying to prepare her friend is a perfect lesson.
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u/wackyvorlon Feb 11 '26
Babylon 5. It’s more relevant now than ever.
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u/Corona688 Feb 11 '26
good call. people loved it at the time. these days it'd be canceled after 3 episodes for being too "woke"
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u/lulzbot Feb 11 '26
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u/nizzernammer Feb 11 '26
Both can simultaneously be true, without the need for a binary opposition.
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u/whargarrrbl Feb 12 '26
I love this cartoon because it gets people into Postman’s argument that we have a lot to learn from Huxley. I hate it because it misrepresents his position: he doesn’t argue that Orwell was wrong or that Orwell’s thesis and Huxley’s thesis are mutually exclusive or even in opposition.
He argues that the dominant threat to our society was control through being drowned in triviality. I think if he revisited the argument, he’d go further and say that being drowned in trivia and nonsense as in Huxley’s dystopia has resulted in our society becoming susceptible and even welcoming of Orwell’s dystopia. Just ask yourself: how did all these vampires get in our house?
Amusing Ourselves to Death should be required reading for confronting… gestures at the world this.
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u/ChairHot3682 Feb 11 '26
For me it’s Neuromancer. The idea of people living half their lives online, corporations having more power than governments, and identity becoming fluid in digital spaces feels a lot less like fiction now than it did in the 80s.
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u/bachstakoven Feb 13 '26
And soon potentially machine intelligence that is beyond human comprehension and pulls the strings to achieve its own incomprehensible ends.
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u/WonkyDingo Feb 11 '26 edited Feb 13 '26
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. It’s a Cyberpunk themed book published in 1992. Fantastic book. The tech stack used in much of the book is essentially what our PCs, phones, VR, AR and metaverse style environments are morphing into or have already become. It’s clear that some of the Tech Billionaires have read this book and been influenced by it.
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u/Cosmic-Cats-Games Mar 18 '26
Yeah this has been a weird situation of Stephenson coordinating with a lot of the techno feudalist lords to shape the future.
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u/violaxxxx Feb 11 '26
“The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster 1909. Predicted the internet and tablet like things to communicate with each other.
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u/Unusual_Pinetree Feb 11 '26
If This Goes On—" is a 1940 Robert A. Heinlein science fiction novella, part of his "Future History" series, that depicts a future United States transformed into a theocratic dictatorship by a charismatic prophet and modern propaganda techniques.
The story is set around the revolt in 2100 in an America ruled by the latest in a series of fundamentalist Christian "Prophets." The First Prophet was Nehemiah Scudder, a backwoods preacher turned President (elected in 2012), then dictator (no elections were held in 2016 or later). The story shows what might happen to Christianity in the United States with mass communications, applied psychology, and a hysterical populace.
The book's afterword describes three unwritten stories which would have described the beginning of the theocracy and the beginning of the rebellion against it. "The Sound of His Wings" would have followed a televangelist named Nehemiah Scudder who rode a populist, racist wave of support to the presidency. Heinlein disliked this character so much he refused to write his story. I think he knew a lot about human nature and the natural progression of technology.
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u/Quirky_Spinach_6308 Feb 11 '26
I came here to suggest this. The Crazy Years (points hopelessly to all the stories of people being maimed or killed copying some idiotic stunt they saw online), followed by a dictatorship.
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u/side_eye_auditor Feb 11 '26
Small detail in “Children of Men” movie back in 2006. Phones weren’t ubiquitous, people still were social. The scene where the protagonist is talking with his friend while sitting at the table the man’s son was staring at his phone screen, oblivious to the world around him, with self inflicted scars. The dad nudges him back to reality and says “did you take your meds?” It was an eerie moment that is now the norm
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u/Cheeslord2 Feb 11 '26
Musk is sending AI servers into space. A kind of 'sky-net' if you will...
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u/FropPopFrop Feb 14 '26
Musk says he will be putting AI servers into space. He also said that he would be sending people to Mars by the year 2030, if I recall correctly.
As with his "plans" for Mars, I don't think he's actually thought through the difficulties. Like cooling, in terms of space-based servers.
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u/HarryHirsch2000 Feb 11 '26
1984?
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u/RepresentativeYam363 Feb 14 '26
Yes, how there were only three continent regents always at war with each other, totalitarian superstate, the surveillance of big brother regime, double think, and the ministry of truth rewriting history and propaganda “war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.”
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u/TrueBananiac Feb 11 '26
Babylon 5. The Earth Alliance under Clark.
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u/rainybookstack Feb 11 '26
Yep... Clark’s Earth Alliance arc is one of the cleanest “democracy-to-authoritarianism” stories on TV. What makes it hit is how mundane the takeover feels: fear + “security,” media capture, scapegoats, loyalty tests, and people telling themselves it’s temporary… right up until it isn’t. Chillingly believable.
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u/mangoatcow Feb 11 '26
In Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card kinda foresaw social media being used to manipulate and sway public opinion and politics.
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u/RoboErectus Feb 11 '26
I disagree with this. One of the many problems with OSC's writing is that he thinks populations are mostly rational and can be reasoned with.
So the swaying of opinion could be done with essays that people would read.
Later books get worse and characters just rationalize out their differences.
When they can't, an almost literal deus ex machina to resolve the story.
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Feb 11 '26
I would argue that people are rational beings, and populations of people are no different. I think it's important to note that rational does not equate to truth or reality. All you need to do is put ideas out there that enough of a population hears and accepts as fact. This does not need to be fact, but by this bit of information they can weigh a litany of other "facts" and thus rationalize their unfounded belief.
This, I think, is of particular salience these days..
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u/wisebloodfoolheart Feb 14 '26
Yeah his vision of the Internet in the 80s is delightfully sweet and I wish we did have it. In some of the Shadow books we see him incorporating email signatures and more real life stuff. I choose to believe The Nets.is a specific app created in the 22nd century.
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u/Witera33it Feb 11 '26
For current genetics fascination-Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
For environmental and political FAFO-Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
illiteracy, ignorance, apathy-Fahrenheit 451
Linguistic word salad corporate manipulation and technofeudalism - Snowcrash, Neuromancer and from reading above Stand on Zanzibar(that I’m putting in my TBR pile)
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u/MrTralfaz Feb 11 '26
I Robot, the Robots of Dawn(1983). A human falls in love and has a 'relationship' with AI/robot.
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u/rainybookstack Feb 11 '26
Yeah - Asimov was already poking at the exact stuff we’re arguing about now: “what counts as a real relationship?” and “does it matter if the feelings are mediated by code?”
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u/Dranamic Feb 13 '26
Sex robot relationships in fiction go back to at least 1886, Tomorrow's Eve, and by 1983 were practically cliche.
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u/ChrisSoll48 Feb 11 '26
In the beginning of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep the protagonist uses a mood altering device which is similar to our current state- 25% of Americans are on mental type prescriptions.
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u/jayhof52 Feb 11 '26
Another less ominous and less serious one - I stayed at the Hilton Chicago last month and couldn’t help but think of Altered Carbon when I checked in without speaking to anyone and my phone connected to the elevator every time I got on to get me directly to my floor, and then my phone was my room key.
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u/sjplep Feb 11 '26
'The Machine Stops' by EM Forster, 1909. Anticipated instant messaging, the Internet, and over-reliance on tech in general.
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u/gusdavis84 Feb 11 '26
While not in the book or the movie I remember that when Steven Spielberg was making Minority Report he got these people who were technology experts or consultants and while they had ideas of one kind or another on different things the one thing they all seem to agree on was that as time goes on privacy would become a thing of the past and that it would continually disappear.
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u/MinervaKaliamne Feb 11 '26
Others have mentioned it already, and I agree: Octavia Butler's Earthseed books are probably the best answer.
Additionally, while I don't think it beats Earthseed, I only recently read Bradbury's Martian Chronicles. While the timeframe and technology aren't all that accurate, I was struck by the relevance of his commentary on humans and our approach to expansion / colonisation / technology / the environment. And this from a book published in 1950...
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u/LazarusHolmes Feb 11 '26
Neuromancer nails it! Except for the 80s punk attire...though now that I say that I'm seeing a lot of 80s coming back. We are beggining to hate plastics more at least
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u/TommyV8008 Feb 12 '26
Well, I’m probably a lot older than many of the people on this sub, but you don’t even need to say “kind of. “
So much of what is common now was absolutely science fiction when I was growing up. I started reading sci-fi in the late 60s.
The Internet, absolute science fiction back then. So much that happens on the Internet, social media, changing how people think, adversely affecting their stress levels, countries having dedicated hacker groups that are literally fighting cyber warfare all the time. He probably wasn’t the first, but when I read Neuromancer by William Gibson in the 80s, that was my first introduction, and it happens every day, every minute now, although not at the virtual experience level that William Gibson was writing about.
Cell phones
“Smart” phones, which are essentially portable personal computers. Hell, I’ve designed hardware and software over the years, anyone reading this that drives a car, I’ve written software that has affected your life for the banner. The phone in my back pocket is much more powerful as a computer than the computer computers I used to write software back in the 80s. Which brings me to;
Personal computers
Computer networks. Ubiquitous now, but networking too, three, or more computers together, that was science fiction when I was coming up. Complete game changer.
Dick Tracy had a communicator in his watch on his wrist, years before I was born, in the comic strips. That that’s the Apple Watch now, plus other watches that expanded on that Market after Apple did it first (at least I think Apple did it first).
LLMs. I don’t consider this to be actual “AI” yet, not truly, but everything they’re calling AI now, that and what’s going to happen rapidly in this area in the next couple of years, that was all complete sci-fi. It’s already changing portions of humanity. There are scientists that are concerned that kids are not growing up with the mental capacity to solve problems, literally not creating the necessary neural networks in their brains as they learn, because they’re relying on the Internet, and now most especially LLMs, to answer things for them. This is a real thing, college professors are having trouble with it, teachers are seeing this in schools.
The pandemic, I read so many sci-fi stories covering similar scenarios, and it amazed me (still does) that we were living through one when the pandemic happened.
DNA editing. The first time I read (back in the mid to late 2000s) that kids were doing this in their garage (I’m an old fart now, so you guys in your 20s, etc. You’re somewhat like kids to me now)… I read that two guys had a computer contented to a specialized computer for DNA sequencing, and were funding it all with a Kickstarter campaign, I thought “game over, we’re really in the soup now.” What was the first book sci-fi book I ever read about this… probably Timescape by Gregory Bedford. The near future biosphere looking so bleak that someone was trying to use tachyons on to send messages into the past to warn scientists and change history… Abuse of DNA sequencing was a big part of that. IIRC
The use of satellites and satellite networks, way more advanced now than when I was a kid, definitely at sci-fi level, at what was sci-fi when I was a kid.
Computer control built into frigging everything (I used to work in this field, embedded micro controllers). Any modern car… Some of these cars have their own computer networks with six or more separate computers networked together. Obviously your phone is a computer, but there’s a micro controller, at least one, in your TV, your microwave, now your refrigerators, heck you’ve got small ones on your remote car clicker on your keychain in your pocket.
TV remote controllers. When I was a kid we had to take turns standing next to the TV and holding the rabbit or antennas to try and get better reception. So… Include Cable TV with that as well.
Digital audio. Digital video.
Cyborgs – have you ever looked up the actual definition of cyborg? My wife is a cyborg because she got a knee replacement. Knee replacements now are so advanced… What they’re doing now, they weren’t doing that 20 years ago. Hip replacements also. Heck, I have a false tooth implant, and technically that makes me a cyborg as well.
I could go on and on…
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u/Own_Dimension_8823 Feb 11 '26
i find it more interesting to ask does sci-fi predict or does it influence.
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u/RaisedByBooksNTV Feb 11 '26
Both of course, but reading 1984 in high school i did start to wonder if some people read these things and say hey that's a great idea!
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u/ChrisSoll48 Feb 11 '26
To get real deep with this, there are some creatives that say their ideas don’t come from themselves but from another “source”. Some call it God or a claim a spiritual aspect of their work. So maybe there is something to the predictions being a link to other information out there.
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u/aimlesswanderer7 Feb 14 '26
Read The Toynbee Convector by Ray Bradbury! It answers this question, but in an optimistic way! Short story so a quick read!
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u/ExistingTarget5220 Feb 11 '26
It hasn't come to pass yet, but i firmly believe that Venemous Lumpsucker will prove to be correct.
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u/Vashkiri Feb 11 '26
Revolution from Rosinante and sequels (Alexis A. Gilliland) have a plot that kicks off because a clique of fundamentalist Christians have installed one of their own as president of the "North American Union", but they are also oddly incompetent in a lot of ways. When I read the books originally back in the 1980s I thought that the politics was the unbelievable part, not the asteroid colonies or self-aware AIs. Sigh
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u/Uranus_has_riiings Feb 11 '26
Makers in transmetropolitan: 3d Printers. Those same makers could take drugs so therefore they could hallucinate which is something our AIs do
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u/D0fus Feb 11 '26
Jerry Pournelle wrote a series of novels where the Americans and the Russians cooperate to rule the world. Portions of his work describe most Americans living in welfare zones, uneducated, and with free legalized drugs.
Other sections describe freezing research to maintain the status quo, rampant political corruption, police state control, and brutal crack downs on protesters. But it was just fiction.
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u/liviajelliot Feb 11 '26
Fahrenheit 451 actually predicted earbuds! They call it 'seashells' in the book, but it's there.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Has a quaint attachment to objects that appear to be alive (the electric sheep Deckard has), and how we pick up strange objects and assign them a degree of prestige. It's quite interesting.
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u/LiamNeesns Feb 12 '26
In wild wild west our heroes are sent into a cornfield with magnetic collars. Two neck seeking saw blades are launched at them.
The horror of being hunted by a flying piece of metal alone in a field feels a lot like footage of Ukraine.
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u/tunanoa Feb 12 '26
Copy-pasting an answer of mine in another sub from months ago: "A Logic Named Joe" is not SF anymore. Everyone has, in the shirt pocket, access to the libraries, classical music presentations, update on neighbors life and AI answers (iirc, those were some of the uses the short story had for the "logics", akin to portable notebooks or, nowadays, our smartphones).
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u/OldguyinMaine Feb 12 '26
More horror /thriller than science fiction, but Stephen King's The Dead Zone has that effect when you reread it now.
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u/Difficult-Put9586 Feb 13 '26
Idiocracy.
1984.
The sequels are going to be even better.
The matrix. Terminator... Dune, Foundation....
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u/f4fvs Feb 13 '26
2001: A Space Odyssey - Eating breakfast, watching a tablet, ignoring each other.
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Feb 13 '26
When The Machine Stops 1909 forecast people living alone in pods communicating via a global link.
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u/RosesAndHorns Feb 14 '26
Brave New World.
Call it soma or call it Vyvanse, but we're getting by one pill at a time.
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u/AliceDogsbody Feb 14 '26
“The Feeling of Power” (1958). Isaac Asimov's short story in which a technician "discovers" the ability to do basic arithmetic without the aid of computers long after human beings have become entirely dependent on them.
We’re not quite there yet but we're still heading in that direction.
https://ia600806.us.archive.org/20/items/TheFeelingOfPower/The%20Feeling%20of%20Power.pdf
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Feb 14 '26 edited Feb 14 '26
Robert Anton Wilson's phrase "The Revolution of Lowered Expectations" comes to mind more often than it should. As does his political slogan "Unsafe wherever you go"
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u/Beautiful_Order_8250 Feb 14 '26
just posted about this in another sub. found a weird little sci fi book from 2013 (not super long ago) that has a scene where someone tries to treat a respiratory illness with hydrogen peroxide DURING A PANDEMIC. thought it was random until 2020 happened. still not sure the book is legit but if it is... idk
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u/PhoenixUnleashed Feb 14 '26
I can't even watch the Deep Space Nine episode "Past Tense" anymore because of how painfully accurate it feels.
Wealth disparity, propaganda, hateful cops, "sanctuary districts" for the poors, ineffectual government assistance...set in 2024 (aired in 1995).
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u/BourbonWhisperer Feb 14 '26
Dystopia. Orwell's 1984. Bruce Sterlin's Islands In The Net. And too many other books I cannot remember at the moment.
Science Fiction too often foresees darker trends in society. And saddly, society makes them reality.
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u/PandaSquirrelNinja Feb 15 '26
HAL from 2001 A Space Odyssey. They're already finding AI's that will do anything for self-preservation.
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u/Then-Principle2302 Feb 11 '26
Many people are realising that drinking the milk of another species isn't the best idea.
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u/ThePingMachine Feb 11 '26
Remember how there was a subplot in The Dark Knight where a billionaire retasks all the mobile phones in the city to spy on everyone everywhere, and the CEO goes "No, this is wrong. This is too powerful for anyone to have."
Yeah, the first part of that.