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Science fiction is never, really, about the future. It’s always a reflection of the time it’s set in, but frequently authors predict what’s coming more accurately than they expected. As we live in a world of artificial intelligence, globalist government, and threat of world war, it might be a fun distraction to evaluate how accurately many sci-fi writers of the past saw their future. Presented is our top 10 list, in no particular order.
I, Robot
Release year: 2004
Setting year: 2035
Loosely (very loosely) based on the Isaac Asimov collection of the same name, this action-thriller follows Will Smith’s fight against an artificial intelligence that wants to wipe out humanity.
Rating: 6/10
Self-driving cars. Corporations control everything. Robots causing mass unemployment. A coke that costs $50. All spot on reasonable. The AI wiping out humanity hasn’t come to pass. Yet.
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
Release year: 1979
Setting year: 2491
An accident puts a NASA pilot into suspended animation before the nuclear holocaust. He awakes 500 years later to save the Earth from alien invasion, dependency on computers, and lameness.
Rating: 1/10
While fun at the time, this gets our lowest rating. I mention it because I’d sure like to sleep through whatever’s coming this century and wake up in a world of space babes and adorable robots.
The Jetsons
Release year: 1962
Setting year: 2062
The eponymous futuristic family – a husband, wife, two kids, space dog, and a robot maid – play on sitcom tropes set 100 years in the future.
Rating: 2/10
Although The Smithsonian once described The Jetsons as “the single most important piece of 20th century futurism,” its prediction that the American nuclear family would survive until the 2060s has proven false, alas. However, Jane Jetson did show the world the first instance of carpal tunnel syndrome with “buttonitis.”
Minority Report
Release year: 2002
Setting year: 2054
Loosely based on the Phillip K Dick novel, this Tom Cruise vehicle shows us a future where murder has gotten so out of hand in the District of Columbia the government uses psychics to arrest people before they can kill.
Rating: 4/10
The government arresting people without them actually doing something wrong? Yup. Holding people accountable for murder? In Washington, DC? Nahhh.
Gattaca
Release year: 1997
Setting year: “not too distant future”
Genetic manipulation has created a future where the rich can maintain social superiority by giving their children perfect abilities while the poor struggle.
Rating: 3/10
Now 25 years later, we don’t have biotech anywhere near on this scale. The rich still just maintain social superiority the old-fashioned way: elite institutions of higher ed and nepotism.
WALL-E
Release year: 2008
Setting year: 2805
In the far-flung future, a lovable robot goes into space to save mankind after consumerism destroyed the Earth.
Rating: 7/10
Too far away to really evaluate, but the idea of a humanity of unrecognizable blobs who stare at screens all day is pretty spot on. ALSO the harmless love story between two robots has been canceled because it’s a love story, so we like it even more.
Elysium
Release year: 2013
Setting year: 2154
In this dystopia, the very wealthy live on a man-made space station while the rest of the population is stuck on a ruined Earth with nothing.
Rating: 8/10
Uhh this really seems less like a prediction about the future and more a documentary about modern-day Los Angeles. The orbital space station replaces gated communities.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Release year: 1995
Setting year: 2024
Moving up the California coast, our heroes from the future are sent back in time in the episodes Past Tense to a ruined San Francisco where new technology has created staggering income disparity.
Rating: 10/10
Depressingly accurate prophesy about liberal hypocrisy in the American city with both the most billionaires and homeless people, even though it didn’t predict the poop app.
V for Vendetta
Release year: 2005
Setting year: 2027
In a dystopia that seems just around the corner, the titular freedom fighter, based on Guy Fawkes, plots to overthrow a tyrannical government. Based on the 1988 graphic novel by Alan Moore.
Rating: 5/10
Although Moore’s radical, far-left worldview could best be described as strongly in favor of Cocoa Puffs, this film does predict that an evil government would use a disease as an excuse to seize power. Also casting John Hurt as the bad guy is a clever nod to …
1984
Release year: 1984
Setting year: 1984
John Hurt plays the last rational man in a world where an evil government uses advanced technology to control every aspect of human life. Based on George Orwell’s prophetic 1949 book of the same name, which we’ve talked about before.
Rating: 9/10
The book is so perennially prescient that it topped Amazon’s best-seller list during the lockdowns. Only thing George got wrong was the year.
What else should we have had on our list? What concerns you about the future? Do you have any leads on how to get put in suspended animation for 500 years? Let us know!
How about Zardos staring Sean Connery about a world long after a devastating war where the rich live in their own utopia seperated from an enslaved humanity by a force field.
Plato’s “Ring of Gyges”… where wearers of the ring are invisible to the rule of law, and able to commit any immoral or illegal act without fear of consequence
Kinda like being a registered Democrat.
Brave New World and Animal Farm
Since you went there with “The Jetsons”, “Futurama”.
All you have to do is read “Atlas Shrugged”, that will show you where we are.
This will not end like “1984” with a technological dictatorship, this — ultimately — if it goes all the way to the bitter end, will end in the world of “Anthem”. A new religious Dark Age, either Christian or Muslim. Technology will collapse and disappear because technology is the product of free minds living in a free society.
Now that I think about it the one thing about “1984” that may come true are the competing dictatorships in perpetual war. But they will be dark age theocracies, a return to Islam versus Christendom. Oceania will be Christendom, Eurasia will be Islamdom, and Eastasia some other religion like Buddhism and its religious dark age theocracy.
You are so anxious to have your dark age theocracy. You push it at least once a week.
Of course, you probably believe you and your religion will somehow come out on top to impose your Objectivist Dark Age. With your pacifist mindset Objectivism will be a lock, right?
Love your predictions that, amazingly, fit that philosophy.
Somehow I don’t think I will be curling up on the sofa with “Atlas Shrugged” for company.
I can’t believe you keep coming to a website weekly that you don’t like.
I like FPM just fine. It is THX’s bloated, endless, anti-religionist Objectivist claptrap that I don’t like.
He has also been warned by the Mods about his spam. so it’s not just me.
Denial does not cancel truth.
What denial and what truth?
I would add Fahrenheit 451 to the mix.
It’s completely unconscionable and totally terrible, those peaceful, non-violent pro-Trump patriots who were unjustly and falsely arrested on January 6th 2021 at Washington DC and then became and still are political prisoners under the Biden regime are treated much worse than those dangerous violent bloodthirsty Jihadists that are held at Gitmo.
This is awful wrong and outrageous.
With that leftist Biden regime having so much power in the US government is a situation is horrendous.
The actual year is 2021 but in spirit it’s “1984.”
That treacherous treasonous subversive socialist Joe Biden with his dangerous and insidious comrades in the Red/Green alliance. Biden is an affront to the Office of the Presidency of the United States and a disgrace to the US Constitution.
As the former US President, Theodore Roosevelt, had well spoken when he declared in a speech “There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is only room here for only hundred percent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.”
Could human stupidity eventually be the cause of our eventual extinction? “Idiocracy” might have made a case for that.
The tragedy might be that America has reached the end of her being a Republic. With the now corrupted FBI with its abuse of its power as observed despicable Biden regime using it to engage in that awful Mar-a Lango raid. Likewise the FBI took a sinister part in the insidious set up against the patriots, involving the The Federal Bureau of Investigation on January 6, 2021 and the later FBI harassment of American Patriots who attended that January 6th rally and the Biden gulag for tyrant Joe’s political prisoners from the day of 1/6/22 and later the FBI raid invasion of residents of Donald Trump, along which many awful other event sines that have occurred since Biden took Office on 1/20/21 those are omens that are overwhelming that United States is come to the very end of her Republic. This is indeed, very tragic and sad.
With the infected and thoroughly infiltrated leftist FBI and considering all the terrible harm Joe Biden has done to the United States is still doing and will continue to do is so very horrendously terrible that the damage might be irreversible . I really hope I’m wrong.
President imposter Joe Biden is leading America to ruin. The terrible harm that Biden is doing to the USA might even be irreversible. As Abraham Lincoln had said, “You can’t unscramble eggs.”
Silent Running (1972) still expreses the Green/Red mesage well.
That Socialist, tyrant, Joe Biden, likes and admires Communist China very much and will support that Red tyranny as for a he is able to. Likewise, Biden won’t oppose its President Xi Jinping in any way.
Biden has such a strong admiration for Red China that he even has his Beijing type political prison in Washington DC which must obviously be modeled on how Communist China mistreats and abuses its own political prisoners who were falsely arrested on January 6, 2021 at Washington D.C
For in the Biden gulag the American patriots falsely arrested in that leftist set up gets worse, those the patriots are kept 23 hours alone in single dark moldy cells to not working plumbing, and this means not even a working toilet. They are also given little food and the little they do receive is of very poor quality. In other words the food is terrible, they are also denied proper medical care, no matter how much anyone on them might desperately need it
This is like the political prison in Communist China. So it’s no wonder that Joe Biden likes Red China and have many of his polices favoring that Red tyranny.
Brazil comes to mind Planet of the Apes then who knows what else
All bad examples ..tHESE ARE BETTER
1/ Invasion of the body snatchers
2? The Omega man
3/Soylent Green
4/IDIOCRACY
5/Eloi and Morlocks
There was no movie called “Eloi And Morlocks” that I can recall.
If I were to guess, maybe you were thinking of The Time Machine from 1960 (IIRC).
Set eight hundred thousand years in the future, there were two humanoid types. One called Eloi and one called Morlock.
Based on the H. G. Wells book
The Jetsons their food consists of Pills and Capsules or food can come straight fro aa Kitchen Appliance and flying cars that fold into brief cases. In Star Trek VI they were working with real food in the Galley and with cooking pots, Lost in Space 1965 took place in 1997 they had a load of food on the bottom level of their Ship the Jupiter 2 Buck Rogers in the 25th Century just go into 500 Year Hibernation cryogenically frozen and they did it on Last in Space The Invaders with Roy Thinus and aliens coming from a dying planet had to regrate themselves every so often in class tubes to maintain their human apparencies’ and when they died they denigrated and left behind their ashes
I remember when I was a young man back in the 1960s-70s hearing from people that in the future every home will have a computer in it just as they have a TV and that this computer will rule your every day life and when you need an answer to your question the computer will give you the answer and such people were thought of as conspiracy nutcases, paranoid crazy people..
Now today if I ask a person a question they look at me weird and reply… Just Google it…
Everybody has a computer in the palm of their hands as well as in every home and they stare down at the screen while walking down the street like living Zombies..
I guess those folks back in the 60s-70s were on to something. Ya think?.