
What Science Fiction Movie or Novel Is Most Prescient Today? - walterbell
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/12/29/what-science-fiction-movie-or-novel-is-most-prescient-today?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region
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lafay
'Sneakers' is worth a re-watch if you haven't seen it lately. Seems very
prescient on the topics of crypto and the NSA -- especially when you consider
that it came out before most people had heard of the Internet.

~~~
etrautmann
re-watched this without realizing just how amazingly prescient it was, and was
blown away. Definitely worth watching again.

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circuitslave
RoboCop - Detroit is broke and crime ridden. How long before Google & an
armored PETMan(1) show up to save the city?

1 -
[http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_petman.html](http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_petman.html)

~~~
Synaesthesia
Environmental disaster ... Omni Consumer Products is a vast corporation that
owns everything, including the goverment.

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codezero
A short story, Minority Report. A lot of the paranoia in Philip K. Dick's
stories resonates with the mass surveillance happening today, in part, because
that paranoia was driven by McCarthyism.

~~~
sitkack
And Mescaline.

[http://www.theguardian.com/film/2006/aug/12/sciencefictionfa...](http://www.theguardian.com/film/2006/aug/12/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.philipkdick)

Dick was a true seer.

~~~
sitkack
And a well researched rebuttal to the above article
[http://ubikcan.blogspot.com/2006/08/philip-k-dick-and-
drugs-...](http://ubikcan.blogspot.com/2006/08/philip-k-dick-and-drugs-
again.html)

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hendryau
No love for 1984? It's so closely related to our industry.

~~~
xutopia
A Brave New World resonates so much more though. 1984 only had the eternal war
and surveillance... Brave New World has distractions to keep people happy when
they're just slaves in a system.

~~~
PavlovsCat
Well, I guess they both had their ways of doublethink and newspeak, because
that I'm seeing, too. And you forget that Nineteen-Eightyfour was written from
the perspective from one of the presumably few people who objected much to
anything going on. They also had their hate sessions and reports of victories
and increasing chocolate rations to keep them happy.

There is an awful lot of sadism and and lust for power for the sake of power
in this world, too. Did Brave New World have a lot of torture and hundreds of
thousands of people screaming in agony, as we do have in our world today? Do
either have drone pilots who call children "fun-sized terrorists", did either
have the Vietnam War? It's not just about slavery, it's about mental illness
in a very real way, if you ask me. Brave New World seems rather more relaxed
compared to that, they think they have it figured out and are coasting
along... Big Brother, just like us, is ever hungry, and his hate and/or
ridicule for those he tortures and mutilates cannot but grow, he has no way
"out" but ahead.

~~~
ZenoArrow
> "Do either have drone pilots who call children "fun-sized terrorists"".

I had some small hope that you were joking, looks like it's not my lucky day
today. Is this the same source you found that out from?

[https://theintercept.com/2015/11/19/former-drone-
operators-s...](https://theintercept.com/2015/11/19/former-drone-operators-
say-they-were-horrified-by-cruelty-of-assassination-program/)

~~~
PavlovsCat
I don't recall if I read that first or the Guardian article linked there, but
yeah. Also, my reference to the Vietnam War was made while still under the
impression of a documentary about the the Winter Soldier investigation:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXdRivBmISE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXdRivBmISE)

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elihu
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut. The value of labor has been devalued by
automation, government is subservient to industry, people's place in society
is determined by standardized test score (those who score poorly may either
join the army or do manual labor, such as repairing potholes).

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ansible
We're not too far away from the world of 'Hardwired' by Walter Jon Williams.

I was reading an article a while back about the drug cartels where they've
created their own submarines to ship cocaine up from South America. Not nearly
as cool as turbojet powered hovercraft with miniguns and SAMs, piloted via
neural interface. But it is still pretty wild, when you think about it.

And of course we've got increased use of robots (drones) involved with
smuggling too.

And then there are the giant mega-corporations, backed by AIs, running the
world. The people in the corporations may think they are in control, but the
corporations themselves have their own agenda.

At least we're also on a good path as far as reusable spacecraft now...

~~~
circuitslave
That's a good one, with our dystopian technocracy it's easy to pull from the
world of cyberpunk for similarities.

~~~
ZenoArrow
I think part of the reason I find dystopian cyberpunk stories so cathartic is
they present an glitzy, exaggerated version of now, where it's easier to see
what can be done to fix things.

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Apocryphon
Children of Men the movie, except the main plot with all women becoming
sterile of course.

Seems like a bit of a cheat to include films that have the world building be
overly reflective over current day problems/anxieties, but still.

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kkylin
I don't know if I would say it's "most prescient today", but Gattaca was
always one of my favorite SF films, and some of what it portrayed may well be
coming our way in the not-so-distant future.

~~~
indubitably
I've been thinking about Gattaca a lot lately too. It's interesting to me how
in the film the mechanism for controlling genetics was to create a bunch of
zygotes and then to pick the best one. But what seems to be happening now (the
creepily named CRISPR and all that) is that people are editing existing DNA
and controlling how DNA functions in living people.

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mbillie1
Curious to see Use of Weapons in there. While it is a fantastic story, it
never struck me as particularly prescient, even compared to some of the other
books in the Culture series.

~~~
INTPenis
Indeed, also what caught my eye since that whole series is about a post-
scarcity civilization and their adventures in the galaxy. Watching the news
one would think that post-scarcity mentality is as far from what we have right
now as you can come.

A man can dream though. ;)

~~~
indubitably
Well, the recent shift in proportion to more obese people than starving people
is at least someone relevant.

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sthomas1618
A: Brave New World

~~~
pklausler
What in "Brave New World" was prescient, really? Maybe I'm an epsilon double
minus on too much soma, but I'm not seeing a world government using genetic
engineering to stratify society.

~~~
TearsInTheRain
I think the GE aspect of that dystopia is secondary to the use of pleasure to
keep everybody conforming and complacent with their place in society.

~~~
ZenoArrow
> "the use of pleasure to keep everybody conforming and complacent with their
> place in society."

That's been going on for a long time, it's telling but not exactly
prescient...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses)

------
myth_buster

      “Chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with 
      information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without 
      moving,”
    

This, from Fahrenheit 451, hit me like a truck.

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widowlark
Snowcrash. So many things that happened in that hypercapitalist world are
happening right now.

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mdjt
From a pure technology standpoint, we're not far off from the VR in Ready
Player One.

~~~
mdjt
Most recently I saw this
[http://www.teslasuit.com/](http://www.teslasuit.com/)

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jds375
With all of the happenings in the middle-east, I'd have to say Dune [0].

[0] -
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/234225](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/234225)

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SCAQTony
Book: George Orwell's "1984" : NSA spying, social network spying, adware too.
Politically congressional bills have sweet sounding names like PATRIOT Act,
and we seemingly change sides in regards to middle east wars.

Movie: Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" \- In the future of 2026, wealthy
[technocrats, energy barons, and Wall Street bankers] rule the vast city of
Metropolis from high-rise tower complexes, while a lower class of underground-
dwelling [Chinese and Mexican workers] toil constantly to operate the machines
that provide its power.

~~~
tilect1
We are beyond George Orwell's "1984" since cellphones.

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VLM
Surprised there's no fans of :

[http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-
read.en.html](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html)

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rst
There are two novels from the 1970s by John Brunner that are astonishingly
prescient: The Shockwave Rider (on computer networks and privacy, also
introducing the idea of self-propagating malware) and Stand On Zanzibar (on
the politics of global resource crises).

Neither gets current-day stuff perfectly (he didn't forsee the resurgence of
Christian conservatism), but on the whole, they get an astonishing amount of
stuff right. Let's hope The Sheep Look Up (on ecological collapse) isn't as
close to the mark.

~~~
shalmanese
The Shockwave Rider absolutely foresaw the rise of Fundamentalism and
religious absolutism.

And I wholeheartedly agree with you (as my username might have hinted).

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syncsynchalt
"Islands in the Net" by Bruce Sterling did a great job of capturing the
current zeitgeist, way back in the 80s. Data havens, guerilla tech, UCAVs, and
a post-9/11 world.

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VLM
Heavy Weather by Bruce Sterling published around 1994

It's extremely hard sci fi about tornado chasers in the USA around now plus a
little bit.

Its fun to read and see how much came true and is coming true.

Weirdly enough his culture, economics, and politics were just as dead on as
his science.

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etrautmann
Cryptonomicon is spot on with data security / crypto / NSA issues

~~~
pklausler
And it's a ripping good yarn to boot, even though it's oddly written entirely
using present tense verbs.

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pjonesdotca
Distraction by Bruce Sterling sometimes seems like it's literally just right
around the corner.

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Symmetry
_Distraction_ by Bruce Sterling has held up very well except for missing open
source software.

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chrisallick
Currently reading Rainbows End.

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doug1001
'Diamond Age' (a pre-Cryptonomicon novel by Neal Stephenson)

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aswanson
Logan's Run. At least in terms of tech career length.

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neffy
Stand on Zanzibar John Brunner

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vparikh
Neuromancer by William Gibson

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JakeAl
Brazil. Definitely Brazil.

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buzzkills
idiocracy

~~~
justifier
unsure why you're getting downvotes, the movie was a satire of the aughties
and yet grows more poignant with time

though exaggerated it is compelling in its depictions of politics, family
planning, television, policing, language, waste management, control through
sedation, food, health, standardised tests, and on and on

hell, it's essentially predicated on a beloved sf author's dismissive pith:

    
    
        There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and 
        there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism 
        has been a constant thread winding its way through our 
        political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion 
        that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as
        your knowledge.

~~~
justifier
and in the end the film remains hopeful of the future

