It is always curious to see when characters in movies and books, born of the imagination of writers and screenwriters from the past, take advantage of modern scientific advances. Some of these items seem amusing and naïve, and some are capable of eliciting an admiring “wow! Here’s the guessing – were these authors visionaries, or did they have access to secret technology, or maybe we just lack the ability to fantasize and make up incredible things ourselves?
Two centuries before…
No, of course, we can recall tales of living and dead water capable of reviving the dead or causing regeneration of body parts. However, they were able to document this technology at the beginning of the 19th century. In Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), a scientist creates a new man using parts of human corpses. Subsequently, science really began to make attempts at reanimation using electric current. And now, two centuries later, it is not so uncommon to successfully transplant donor organs taken from deceased people. Moreover, they began to reattach severed limbs quite a long time ago.
The writer Jules Verne is called one of the most successful fantasists. And all this despite the fact that for many years he did not go on trips beyond the suburbs of Paris. “There will come a time when the achievements of science will surpass the power of imagination,” he said. And indeed, many years later a lunar module, a solar sail, and an electric submarine, described in his most famous novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), became a reality.
Edward Bellamy, who described his hero’s miraculous dream at 113, even 63 years before their use, described credit cards. The novel, familiar to Russian readers as In the Year 2000, predicted the use of this form of payment for the purchase and sale of goods and services.
The discovery of astronomers from the fantastic island of Laputa cannot be called anything other than miraculous. They discovered that the planet Mars has two satellites. Conceived as a satirical novel, however, Gulliver’s Travels (1726) was able to make this prediction more than 150 years before the actual discovery.
Early 20th century
World War I accelerated not only scientific progress, as military technology began to be applied to ordinary life, but also gave impetus to new ideas. The famous science fiction writer Herbert Wells predicted in another military fiction novel the emergence of a new and perfect weapon. Long before physicist Leo Szilard substantiated the self-sustaining nuclear reaction and participated in the Manhattan Project, he invented the atomic bomb. But his version of the dangerous weapon, described in the novel The Free World, was the size of a hand grenade and consisted of conventional TNT with radioactivity added. It was not until thirty years later that real atomic bombs flew on Japanese cities.
One day a clairvoyant woman came to lawyer Alexander Belyaev and asked him for protection in court. The case was won, but the woman predicted to the defender not a successful career as a lawyer, but that he himself would become a visionary. And so it happened – the science fiction writer predicted the invention of the artificial lung, the compressed air scuba tank, air pollution, spacewalking, the orbital station, and space travel.
Also another Soviet science-fiction writer with a passion describes interplanetary spaceships long before they appeared. In 1923, Alexei Tolstoy’s novel Aelita was published, where the characters, armed with the idea of Nikolai Kibalchich and Tsiolkovsky’s notes, build a flying machine for a flight to Mars.
50s of the 20th century
In the postwar era, people not only wondered how to build a new world, but also what awaited their society in the not-too-distant future. Superpower rivalry, unchanging redistribution of the world, uncontrolled free-thinking – all the things that many believed led to the world wars were to undergo a transformation in the future. George Orwell’s classic dystopia, 1984 (1949), introduced such political concepts as “Big Brother,” “thought police,” and “doublethink. Doesn’t that sound familiar? Also featured in his work are police officers supervising the city by helicopter, mass surveillance with video cameras installed everywhere, censorship and mass propaganda.
The sixties of the 20th century
Of course, during the years of active space exploration, advanced sci-fi writers couldn’t help but dream of a technically perfect future. Arthur C. Clarke’s A Space Odyssey predicted the creation of artificial intelligence, making the novelty supercomputer HAL 9000 both incredibly convenient and fraught with danger. Don’t you start your mornings with a cup of tea and browsing news sites? Well, this novel anticipated that possibility as early as 1968, describing “electronic newspapers.”
And the science fiction writer John Brunner went beyond newspapers to describe television, which works by means of a signal from a satellite. Also the characters in his 1968 dystopia, Everybody Stand on Zanzibar, use a laser printer, drive around in electric cars and even smoke marijuana in peace.
The 70’s of the 20th century
The first mention of a half-robot half-human was in Martin Kaidin’s novel Cyborg (1972). (1972). His main character loses one eye and almost all of his limbs in a space accident. Miracle doctors manage to return the astronaut to normal life: they implant metal implants, improving his vision with a removable camera. Do you agree, what is not the prediction of bionic prosthetics? And that’s in 41 years of the first successful application!
Another fantastic work of this time is Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1971) by Douglas Adams. The development of transport, the discovery of new routes, accessibility to travel to the farthest corners of the planet allowed the writers to the idea that it would be good to have a universal translator who knows all the languages of the world. This idea was embodied in a fantasy novel, in which the main characters are forced to travel through the corners of our universe. This dream became a reality 34 years later.
80s of the 20th century
For people of this generation, universal computerization no longer seems so far away. Writers begin to wonder what the new world will bring them. William Gibson pondered this in his novel Neuromancer (1984). This work not only used concepts such as artificial intelligence, genetic engineering and cyberspace long before they appeared in popular culture, but it also won three prestigious awards – the Nebula, the Hugo and the Philip K. Dick Award for Best Science Fiction Work. Curiously, the novel itself was typed on an ordinary typewriter.