But, science-fiction soothsaying is a tradition stretching back to its very first incarnation – the sci-fi novel.
We’ve rounded-up ten astonishing occasions when authors have made us believe that they could see way into the future…
1. The Moon Landings
In From The Earth To The Moon (1865), author Jules Verne predicted one of the biggest events in 20th-century history.
He wrote: “In spite of the opinions of certain narrow-minded people, who would shut up the human race upon this globe... We shall one day travel to the moon, the planets, and the stars, with the same facility, rapidity, and certainty as we now make the voyage from Liverpool to New York.”
Verne even managed to correctly predict several elements of NASA's 1960s space programme – such as lunar modules launching from Florida, and their return as splashdown capsules.
2. Credit Cards
“A credit corresponding to his share of the annual product of the nation is given to every citizen on the public books at the beginning of each year", Richard Bellamy wrote in his communist novel Looking Backward (1888).
"And a credit card issued him with which he procures at the public storehouses, found in every community, whatever he desires whenever he desires it.”
Sixty-two years after Bellamy outlined the concept, credit became available for public use.
3. Video Calling
E.M. Forster might well have seen the future when he wrote in The Machine Stops in 1909: “But it was fully fifteen seconds before the round plate that she held in her hands began to glow."
"A faint blue light shot across it, darkening to purple, and presently she could see the image of her son, who lived on the other side of the Earth, and he could see her.”
Sounds a lot like Skype, doesn’t it? Skype’s first public beta-version was released on 29 August 2003, an astonishing 94 years after Forster’s book was published.
4. The Atomic Bomb
Writing one of the predictions on this list that should have stayed in literature, H.G. Wells alluded to nuclear warfare in his 1914 novel The World Set Free.
“The amount of energy that men were able to command was continually increasing. Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict a blow, the power to destroy, was continually increasing", he wrote. "Before the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city.”
This prediction came true in 1945, when the world’s first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in Japan.
5. Voicemail
Turns out that H.G. Wells was a pretty good prophesier.
In Men Like Gods (1923), he alluded to a concept that we all rely on today: “In Utopia, except by previous arrangement, people do not talk together on the telephone. A message is sent to the station of the district in which the recipient is known to be, and there it waits until he chooses to tap his accumulated messages. And any that one wishes to repeat can be repeated.”
Almost 60 years after Wells described it in detail, answer machines became a household essential in the US before spreading across the world as voicemail, as mobile phones rose in popularity in the 1980s.
6. Apple Earbuds
“Wasn’t there an old joke about the wife who talked so much on the telephone that her desperate husband ran out to the nearest store and telephoned her to ask what was for dinner?", Ray Bradbury wrote in 1953 sci-fi classic Fahrenheit 451.
"Well, then, why didn't he buy himself an audio-Seashell broadcasting station and talk to his wife late at night, murmur, whisper, shout, scream, yell?”
Bradbury's fortune-telling came true in 2001 when Apple’s in-ear headphones – known as earbuds (but resembling the small shells of Fahrenheit 451) – hit the market, revolutionising the way we listen to music.
7. Virtual Reality Video Games
Author Arthur C. Clarke was on to something in his 1956 novel The City And The Stars.
“When you entered into a saga", he wrote. "You were not merely a passive observer, as in the crude entertainments or primitive times which Alvin had sometimes sampled. You were an active participant and possessed – or seemed to possess – free will. The events and scenes which were the raw material of your adventures might have been prepared beforehand by forgotten artists, but there was enough flexibility to allow for wide variation.”
Sixty years later and tech has finally fully caught up with Clarke’s vision of the future, with virtual reality headsets fast-becoming the most popular way to play computer games.
8. Tablet Computers
“One by one he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers", Arthur C. Clarke wrote in 1968 sci-fi classic A Space Odyssey.
“Switching to the display unit’s short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him.”
Apple's iPad was announced on January 27, 2010, 42 years after Clarke described how we’d eventually use them on our lunchbreak.
9. Basically, Everything
This is seriously spooky!
When soothsayer John Brunner gazed into his 2010 crystal ball for Stand On Zanzibar (1969), he didn't just see satellite and on-demand TV: “We’re aware of the scale of the planet, so we don’t accept that our own circumscribed horizons constitute reality. Much more real is what’s relayed to us by the TV.”
He also predicted that the President of the US was a popular man named Obami, terrorism would be the biggest threat to society, the EU would exist and the tobacco industry is unpopular...
10. Cyberspace
"He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix", William Gibson wrote in his 1984 work Neuromancer.
"A thief he'd worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who provided the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data."
Although the Internet existed when Gibson wrote his iconic SF epic, the world wide web was yet to be unleashed on the masses. Gibson didn’t just predict it would be used to transmit data, but that the data would be valuable enough to be stolen by professional hackers.
