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+--- Thread: Prophecies of great science fiction authors (/thread-20986.html)
Prophecies of great science fiction authors - Magical Realist - Jul 30, 2026
"Writers of science fiction are considered prescient. Prophetic writers like Margaret Atwood foresaw the threat to women’s rights, JG Ballard foresaw the architectural and social dystopias and E M Forster predicted the Internet in “The Machine Stops” (1909). Jonathan Swift imagined that Mars had two moons. Aldous Huxley foresaw oral contraception and test-tube babies. George Orwell’s vision had telescreens and mass surveillance..."--- https://john-pucadyil.medium.com/the-dystopian-futures-of-philip-k-dick-7ca8ed124684
I hereby devote this thread to some of the prescient pronouncements of sci-fi writers. We owe much to our own cultural creativity and ethical discourse to these great seers of future dystopias.
H. G. Wells, from The Time Machine, 1895:
"I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes — to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed.
It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers."
“We and our environments form such interconnected cluster systems that mutually process information and alter it while exchanging it; we are all (humans) like a vast compound eye which shows a repetition of the motion of a single object but each cell reflecting slightly differently. (p.155)”― Philip K. Dick , The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick
John Brunner's forgotten yet highly prophetic novels:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzMEQoErtA8&t=82s
RE: Prophecies of great science fiction authors - Magical Realist - Jul 30, 2026
“There will come a time when it isn't 'They're spying on me through my phone' anymore. Eventually, it will be 'My phone is spying on me'.”― Philip K. Dick
RE: Prophecies of great science fiction authors - Magical Realist - Aug 1, 2026
Arthur C. Clarke on the coming of AI:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkhddj7Alic
RE: Prophecies of great science fiction authors - Magical Realist - Aug 1, 2026
"There’s an idea in the science-fiction community called steam-engine time, which is what people call it when suddenly twenty or thirty different writers produce stories about the same idea. It’s called steam-engine time because nobody knows why the steam engine happened when it did. Ptolemy demonstrated the mechanics of the steam engine, and there was nothing technically stopping the Romans from building big steam engines. They had little toy steam engines, and they had enough metalworking skill to build big steam tractors. It just never occurred to them to do it. When I came up with my cyberspace idea, I thought, I bet it’s steam-engine time for this one, because I can’t be the only person noticing these various things. And I wasn’t. I was just the first person who put it together in that particular way, and I had a logo for it, I had my neologism."---William Gibson