Jules Verne wrote about gasoline-powered vehicles, weapons of mass destruction, and global warming more than a century ago.
By Tim Brinkhof
March 21, 2023 -- When the American financier J.P.
Morgan hired the inventor of the lightbulb, Thomas Edison, to wire his mansion
in New York, his father Junius Morgan warned him that electric light was only a
passing craze. In 1903, Horace Rackham, the personal lawyer of automobile
manufacturer Henry Ford, was told that cars would never replace horse-drawn
carriages. And in his 1961 book The Wonderland of Tomorrow, Brendan
Matthews announced that, soon, technology would allow us to eliminate aging and
bad weather.
Predicting the future
with any degree of accuracy is difficult, but certainly not impossible. As
Czech writer Karel Čapek, whose 1920 play RUR is believed to
have coined the term “robots,” once said, “Some of the future can always be read in the palms
of the present.” The greater your understanding of science, society, and human
nature, the more you can read. While some are more well-known than others,
there is no shortage of books with shockingly accurate predictions of the
future.
Science vs science
fiction
Classic literature
anticipated a variety of modern inventions. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,
one of the first true science fiction stories, foreshadowed the development of
bioelectronics, organ transplants, genetic engineering, and artificial
intelligence, to name just a few things. On a deeper level, Shelley’s 1818
novel also predicted the inevitable confrontation between science, religion,
and ethics – a confrontation that carries on today with no clear end in sight.
The book with the
largest number of accurate predictions might be Jules Verne’s Paris in the Twentieth Century. Verne, the author
of Journey to the Center of the Earth and Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, is one of the most influential sci-fi
writers of all time. But Paris in the Twentieth Century proved
to be particularly prophetic. In a single narrative, written during the 1860s,
Verne mentions gasoline-powered vehicles, weapons of mass destruction, global
warming, and changing gender norms.
Some predictions of mankind
can be traced back to ancient times. In her book, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of
Technology, the historian Adrienne Mayor points to the myth of Talos,
an automaton constructed by Hephaestus, as an example of Greeks using their
imagination to exceed the limitations of their technology. “Ideas about
creating artificial life,” she writes, “were thinkable long before technology made
such enterprises possible.”
From utopias to
dystopias
Before there was
dystopian fiction – a subgenre of science fiction we are all too familiar with
nowadays – there was utopian fiction. Writers and thinkers from Plato to Thomas
Moore drew on the latest in political, philosophical, and scientific thinking to
build blueprints for an ideal civilization. In the 19th century,
authors like H.G. Wells and Jack London started to flip the age-old formula on
its head, exploring how human development could lead to a distinctly undesirable
future.
Every dystopian novel contains
at least some echo of reality. Buzz Windrip, the demagogue politician who is
elected president of the United States in Sinclair Lewis’ book It Can’t
Happen Here (1935), was originally meant to be an allegory for Adolf
Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Today, his brand of populism foils that of Donald
Trump as well. In The Minority Report (1956) by Philip K.
Dick, cops use algorithms to arrest criminals before they commit the crime — a
long-standing objective in real-life AI research.
Yevgeny
Zamyatin’s We, a major influence on George Orwell’s 1984,
Ayn Rand’s Anthem, and Kurt
Vonnegut’s Player Piano, takes place in an ultra-rational
totalitarian state where people have numbers for names and follow instructions
from an all-powerful dictator called The Benefactor. Released in 1924, the book
satirizes an urge shared by capitalist businessmen and communist dictators
alike: to turn people into obedient, indistinguishable machines.
Zamyatin’s characters
insist on the right to be imperfect, make mistakes, and act of their own free
will. It’s a moving sentiment, but Zamyatin was not the first writer to put it
into words. As literary critics have noted, We stands on the
shoulders of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella Notes from Underground,
in which the Russian author effectively predicted the rise of 20th-century
totalitarian regimes that sought to control every aspect of their subjects’
lives.
Books that shaped the
future
Unlike We,
which takes issue with parties on both sides of the political spectrum, Notes
From Underground was written specifically in response to the rise of
socialist movements in 19th-century Russia. As a Christian, Dostoevsky
sympathized with the desire to end injustice and uplift the poor. At the same
time, he believed all utopias – socialist or otherwise – are doomed to fail
because people value freedom above all else. Like John Milton’s Lucifer, they
would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven.
Dostoevsky was
particularly upset by What is to be Done?, a social problem novel
by Nikolay Chernyshevsky that, while awkwardly written, imparts a clear
impression of what socialist utopias could look like and how socialist
revolutionaries are supposed to act. Defying expectations, What is to
be Done?became immensely popular upon its 1863 release. Today, it is a rare
example of a book that didn’t just predict the future but also shaped it in its own image.
Imitating
Chernyshevsky’s characters, young Russians slept on beds of nails to become
tougher and took up work in communal sewing cooperatives. Revolutionaries
Nikolai Ishutin and Dmitry Karakozov were so enamored by the book they plotted
to assassinate Czar Alexander II on the anniversary of its publication, and
Vladimir Lenin read What is to be Done? five times after his
brother was executed for plotting his own assassination attempt. Would the
future have unfolded the way it did without Chernyshevsky?
This excerpt was
reprinted with permission of Big Think,
where it was originally
published.
https://www.freethink.com/culture/science-fiction-predictions
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