Re: Near-Future SF That Almost Forecast Actual Events

On 1/19/2025 3:58 AM, Charles Packer wrote:

On Sat, 18 Jan 2025 14:29:26 -0000 (UTC), Christian Weisgerber wrote:
 

On 2025-01-18, Robert Woodward <robertaw@drizzle.com> wrote:
>

People have been writing near-future SF for decades and when the future
comes, it doesn't resemble those books. However, on occasion there have
been odd matches.

>
It's hard to beat the Québécois TV show _Épidémie_, which was presumably
shot in summer 2019, aired from January to March 2020,
and presented the fictional outbreak of a coronavirus epidemic in
Montréal.

 You could go back to 1979, where the movie "The China Syndrome"
seemed to prophecy the Three-Mile Island accident.
 In 1886 W. T. Stead wrote a novel that seemed to prophecy the
Titanic disaster. But that was so far ahead of the event that
it might not have registered in public consciousness as
prophecy. But he did go down with the Titanic, so he gets
extra points...

I don't know about Stead, but in 1898 Morgan Robertson
published "The Wreck of the Titan", in which a huge
"unsinkable" ocean liner strikes an iceberg in fog
while sailing from Ireland to America, sinking with
few survivors.
This was 14 years before the Titanic. It was republished
after the sinking, with some modifications apparently to
make it an even closer match to the Titanic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wreck_of_the_Titan:_Or,_Futility
pt