Re: Near-Future SF That Almost Forecast Actual Events

On Sat, 18 Jan 2025 15:58:57 -0000 (UTC), jdnicoll@panix.com (James
Nicoll) wrote:

In article <slrnvonem6.1b09.naddy@lorvorc.mips.inka.de>,
Christian Weisgerber  <naddy@mips.inka.de> 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.

>
Waaaaaaay back in the 1980s, there was a Canadian show about a pandemic
originating in Toronto. The city was subjected to a rather brutual
quarantine. One of the fictional news announcers covering the story
was oddly gleeful about it all. That guy was played by Tom Cherington,
who was a well-known (at the time) news guy from Hamilton and he didn't
care for Toronto _at all_.

Cronenberg's /Rabid/ was in 1977. But the city there was Montreal.

I recently (well, mid-December) saw /Viral/ on Netflix. Sisterhood and
survival are what it's about.

And there are surely many many others.
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"