Did These Books Forecast the Future? (Infographic)

An infographic from printerinks.com charts actual discoveries that authors predicted before they happened, some of which you may not have known about. Did these books forecast the future?

I was aware of several of these discoveries, such as the government spying that George Orwell predicted in 1984 and the foreseen genetic engineering in Brave New World, but I can’t say that I knew credit cards were predicted in 1888.

While some predictions are more obvious and inevitable than others, like the computer beating the human in chess (The Age of Intelligent Machines), others are weirdly prescient, like in-vitro fertilization in Daedalus. The funny thing is: I can see another sci-fi nerd having the exact opposite view, that a computer beating a human is the unexpected prediction, and having an argument to back it up. That’s part of why I love science fiction novels: their interpretations of the future are objectively precise and yet quite subjective.

Take George Orwell and 1984, for example. Years before he wrote 1984, he survived the Spanish Civil War and witnessed the machinations of propaganda and fascism up-front. Fascists were using newspapers to circulate lies about various Spanish resistance militias, one of which he was serving in. As is true today, the printed word was the general public’s only true source of “information.” In turn, he wrote an entire book, Homage to Catalonia, to set the record straight about the Spanish resistance militias. His knowledge of fascism and its workings even made him ponder the extents totalitarian governments would go to control their populace. He knew that, at the rate things were going with war, spies, and propaganda, government spying would be a part of the not-so-distant future. And he was right.

But I digress. I could talk about dystopian literature forever. Thanks go to printerinks for the great infographic and conversation starter.