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01:55:39 AM Jan 3rd 2014
I have a serious problem with the page quote article and the general tone of this.

What almost everyone seems to forget is that virtually every work of art makes ASSUMPTIONS. Whenever a writer writes about the future, they make certain assumptions not only about the future, but also about the path the society takes towards that future. The collapse of the Soviet empire was not foreseen by any of the authors, and it is possible that if the Soviet empire didn't collapse, the arms race and space race and other effects would force USA to invest more heavily into the space program, A.I. etc., thus making a lot of the things predicted for the future closer today.

At the same time, a lot of the progress in the area of mobile communications etc. were clearly the result of serendipity or improbable chance - What exactly were the chances of the Google founders meeting and founding Google? What were the chances they would reject being purchased by Microsoft and subsequently their ideas butchered by corporate bulldozers?

Steve Jobs got a rare, treatable form of cancer; if it was any other, he'd be dead before iPhone ever hit the shelves. StarCraft I might have been a horrible disaster if one of the coders in the company wasn't brave enough to say "Look, the current version sucks, give me 3 months and I'll remake the engine into something much better". Consequently, South Korea would never become an e-Sport superpower, pumping craploads of money into the computer games business, Blizzard would not have enough money for World of WarCraft and who knows, maybe Kinect would not exist today.

And so on and so on. Therefore, whoever mocks old (or very old) movies for missing the mark when predicting future comes across as extremely arrogant to me.

Sorry for the rant, and thank you for reading.
11:33:04 AM Aug 30th 2012
edited by Flagfish
This needs some cleanup; a lot of the examples are Next Sunday A.D.. The description could also use a rewrite, it's a bit confusing as it is and doesn't explain the trope very well.
12:48:53 AM Apr 24th 2012
Would "The Future of Us" by Jay Asher and Carolyn Macker be an example of this? To those who don't know, it takes place in 1996 and is about two teenagers who get hold of an AOL demo CD that somehow allows them to access their Facebook profiles from fifteen years in the future.
04:17:52 AM Oct 16th 2010
And it seems all of this is only because the author wants the story to become real life.
04:45:21 AM Jul 24th 2010
Concerning Harry Potter: I seem to recall reading an interview with Rowling where she states most of the events of the books take place during the 1990s. This would make the epilogue of the final book actually the only scene taking place more or less during the time of publishing.
07:40:02 AM Mar 26th 2010
DN 3 D wasn't released in 1997. It was actually released in early 96.
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