It's almost as if these authors had a crystal ball! Here are books that predicted the future to an eerily accurate degree.
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10 Books That Predicted the Future with Unsettling Accuracy
Updated on Aug. 23, 2024
Books that foretold the future
Imagine an information-oriented world where people work from home, communicate via instant messages and videos, and form and maintain friendships electronically. It sounds an awful lot like life in the 2020s, right? Believe it or not, it’s actually the premise of E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, a sci-fi short story published in 1909. And that’s only one of several books that predicted the future.
You’ll find futuristic books in a range of genres, though science fiction stories and dystopian tales tend to most accurately forecast the future. Whether they’re imagining up an AI-driven future, guessing how climate disasters may go or taking a stab at the future of authoritarianism, these novels create worlds that could be—and may be—our future. But you’ll find only a select number of books that predicted the future as we know it.
All of the titles on our list have somehow managed to shed light on what the world would one day become, and they’ve done it with eerie accuracy. Read on for 10 of the best books to read if you’re looking for books that seemingly predicted the future.
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Parable series by Octavia E. Butler
The prediction
Though she died before completing the third novel in her Parable book series, science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler created a dystopian world in Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) that featured the rise of a populist demagogue. While the books were well-received when they were published, they have struck a chord with readers more recently, given some stark similarities between the society Butler created and our reality today, including global warming and social inequality. But the strangest parallel came in Parable of the Talents, where she writes about a conservative evangelist who runs for president using the slogan “Make America Great Again.”
Our reality
Although President Ronald Regan used the slogan “Let’s Make America Great Again” during his 1980 campaign for the White House, it’s now most closely associated with former President Donald Trump, who first used the phrase in a 2011 statement announcing that he would not moderate a Newsmax-sponsored debate. Trump went on to use the slogan during the 2016 presidential campaign. The phrase “Make America Great Again” and the MAGA movement remain an essential element in Trump’s 2024 campaign for the presidency.
As for those other predictions? Well, today, we refer to “global warming” as “climate change.” And we’re already starting to experience some of the effects scientists predicted—including more intense heat waves, melting glaciers and ice sheets, the loss of sea ice and the rise of sea levels, according to NASA.
Then there’s Parable‘s predicted social inequality. The result of the unequal and unjust distribution of resources, opportunities and rewards within a society, social inequality has been increasing in the United States and around the world because of the constantly widening gap between rich and poor. The wealth gap in America has been growing steadily for the past 60 years: In 1963, for instance, the country’s wealthiest families had 36 times the wealth of families in the middle of the wealth distribution; by 2022, they had 71 times the wealth of families in the middle, according to data from the Urban Institute.
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1984 by George Orwell
The prediction
George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 (published in 1949) predicted so many aspects of the future that referring to it has become shorthand for any situations in which technology threatens to control aspects of society. In fact, the term Big Brother, which today refers to an all-powerful government—specifically involving surveillance—originated in 1984.
Among the technological advancements described in the book is the “telescreen,” essentially a large television used to monitor people’s private lives and identify a person based on their facial expressions and heart rate. The second example is the Versificator: a machine that can automatically produce music and literature.
Our reality
While forms of government surveillance existed when Orwell wrote the book, it intensified with the passing of the Patriot Act in October 2001, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. Prior to the Patriot Act, “courts could permit law enforcement to conduct electronic surveillance to investigate many ordinary, non-terrorism crimes, such as drug crimes, mail fraud and passport fraud,” according to the U.S. Department of Justice. After the law was enacted, these governmental powers were expanded to include additional types of surveillance when suspected terrorist activities are involved.
But that’s not the only way we’ve steered into 1984. Aspects of the telescreen have become a reality in various forms of technology today, including facial recognition software, video surveillance and health-monitoring devices like smartwatches.
Meanwhile, the Versificator predicted artificial intelligence (AI) software, which can be programmed to make art and write music, emails, articles, essays and even fiction. Of course, the quality of AI-produced materials can be questionable and some degree of human input is still required, but what was once science fiction is now our reality and will likely get closer to the Orwellian version in the future.
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The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster
The prediction
In his 1909 short story, The Machine Stops, E.M. Forster imagined a future in which people live and work exclusively in their own rooms, communicating with one another entirely through electronic means, says Kenneth Schneyer, professor of humanities and legal studies at Johnson & Wales University. The people in the book create and sustain their “friendships,” “groups” or “teams” entirely through electronic communication—and eventually become positively phobic about leaving their rooms or meeting other people in the flesh. Yes, The Machine Stops basically predicted the internet.
Our reality
While the telephone did exist when Forster wrote his short story, radio was virtually unknown, and television hadn’t been invented, Schneyer explains. “Until the internet and social media, I don’t think anyone thought of Forster’s novella as prophetic,” he tells Reader’s Digest. “But by the time I first taught it to students five years ago, I was able to say with a straight face, ‘We are all living the nightmare that Forster is dreaming in Hell.’ In the world of commerce-via-Zoom, it’s even more true. ”
When the Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells
The prediction
Science-fiction writer H.G. Wells had a knack for predicting the future of warfare—including the atom bomb in his 1914 novel The World Set Free, according to Andrew Peck, an interdisciplinary researcher and educator who has helped train military aviators and taught English at universities. But that wasn’t his first book that predicted the future.
“Wells’s habit for seeing the future of armed conflict extends to his visions of the use and importance of airpower in warfare in his 1899 story When the Sleeper Wakes,” Peck tells Reader’s Digest. It tells the tale of an Englishman who took sleeping pills to cure his insomnia in 1897, then fell into a coma and didn’t wake up until the year 2100. He comes to find out that he came into a massive inheritance and now owns much of the world. Of course, there are all kinds of futuristic inventions in the year 2100, including airplanes used in warfare.
Our reality
Four years after the book was published, the “Wright brothers first got off the ground with a manned, heavier-than-air plane,” Peck explains. It was also 12 years before the first use of an aircraft as an instrument of warfare—or what Peck describes as “the first military aerial reconnaissance mission”: the Italo-Turkish War, fought between Italy and the Ottoman Empire in 1911.
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Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The prediction
When Ray Bradbury’s book Fahrenheit 451 was published in 1953, television was already a popular form of entertainment in America. At that time, most of the programming consisted of scripted comedies and mysteries, game shows, news programs and variety shows. But the book featured what sounds a lot like modern reality TV. “Bradbury, who was more interested in the way humans would react to technology than technology itself, imagined a world in which wall-sized televisions involved viewers directly in the action of the programs,” Schneyer explains.
Our reality
As Schneyer points out, Bradbury “anticipat[ed] not only our wide-screen media but also reality TV.” Technically, the first reality-based television show, Candid Camera, debuted in 1948—five years before Fahrenheit 451 was published. But the show featured pranks played on unsuspecting people, rather than a competition or narrative program following the lives of real people. The first example of the latter, An American Family, premiered in 1973 on PBS and documented the lives of a family in Santa Barbara, California, for seven months. Other notable early reality TV shows include MTV’s The Real World, which began in 1992, and Survivor, which started airing on CBS in 2000.
According to Schneyer, Bradbury’s predictions went one step further. “More than [reality TV], he foresaw how people would become increasingly devoted to their television programs, even in preference to their home lives and personal relationships,” he says. “Although this book did not imagine the election of a reality TV star as president, I doubt that Montag [its protagonist] would be surprised.”
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The Wreck of the Titan by Morgan Robertson
The prediction
Even though The Wreck of the Titan is one of the most well-known examples of books that predicted the future, it’s still hard to believe. Written by Morgan Robertson and originally published under the title Futility in 1898, the novella tells the tale of a massive passenger ship named Titan that hits an iceberg and sinks in the frigid waters of the Atlantic Ocean, killing thousands of people. The Titan is described as the largest ship of its time and deemed “unsinkable” before it drops to the bottom of the North Atlantic in April. What’s more, there’s a shortage of lifeboats.
Our reality
When the White Star Line’s R.M.S. Titanic embarked on its maiden voyage on April 10, 1912, it was the largest and most luxurious transatlantic passenger ship. And like the fictional Titan, it was reported to be “unsinkable.” The ship struck an iceberg roughly 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland just before midnight on April 14, 1912, and sank around two-and-a-half hours later. Yes, the same month the made-up Titan sank.
Like the Titan, the Titanic did not have enough space in lifeboats to accommodate all of the 2,240 passengers and crew onboard, resulting in the deaths of approximately 1,500 people when the ship went down. Considering the number of similarities between the fictional tale and real-life event, this short book holds major appeal for history buffs.
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A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker
The prediction
A more recent (and tragically timely) example of a book that predicted the future is Sarah Pinsker’s novel A Song for a New Day. Published on Sept. 10, 2019—and written two or three years prior—the book takes place in a society dealing with a combination of domestic terrorism and a lethal pandemic.
“That causes the government to outlaw gatherings beyond a certain size and to radically alter the economy, such that nearly everyone works full-time from home, wearing protective gear at all times when away from home,” Schneyer explains. “One of the two protagonists is a singer/songwriter whose livelihood depended on live gatherings of audiences and who is now unable to do what she was born to do. Another protagonist is a young woman who was a child during the pandemic [and] who is terrified of any other person or any public space.”
Our reality
Unless you’ve been living on a far-flung space station for the past four years, you know where we’re going with this: In 2020, the world experienced a one-in-a-lifetime pandemic with COVID-19. Not only did it have a significant impact on the economy, but it also resulted in many people working from home, wearing personal protective equipment in public and avoiding gatherings of large crowds.
Making Pinsker’s novel even more prescient are the events of Jan. 6, 2021. That’s when the United States experienced an incident of domestic terrorism when a group of people attacked the U.S. Capitol.
Foundation series by Isaac Asimov
The prediction
First published in the early 1950s, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series of sci-fi books predicted a science called “psychohistory” in which the future could be predicted by accurately measuring current developments and trends in human behavior and life, says Paul Levinson, PhD, a professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University and the author of science fiction and nonfiction books.
Our reality
Today, data on past events is used in all manner of calculations, risk assessments and AI and machine learning. “Although statistics as a way of gauging the public existed back then, they were very rudimentary in comparison to today’s surveys and statistics, which are used every day to measure and predict everything from consumer behavior and voting preferences to the impact of COVID-19,” he tells Reader’s Digest. “In other words, the psychohistory in Asimov’s science fiction has become a crucial way of life in our world.”
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Sultana’s Dream by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
The prediction
In her 1905 feminist utopian story, The Sultana’s Dream, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain—a Muslim feminist social reformer from Bengal—described a place called Ladyland, where men were locked away so women could actually get stuff done without having to deal with annoying distractions like violence and war. With so much additional time in their schedules, the women of Ladyland have the opportunity to invent other useful things, like flying cars, weather control and laborless farms. Though that part hasn’t happened (yet), Hussain does predict the use of solar power.
Our reality
While humans have been making use of the sun’s energy for centuries, the first modern solar-electric cell was invented by scientists at Bell Labs in 1954. The first satellite with solar cells was launched in 1958, and around the same time, solar panels were also used to power remote pieces of electrical equipment like rural telephone lines, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. By the end of the 20th century, solar power had become far more mainstream, as businesses, farms and homes began installing solar panels and using the sun as a source of energy.
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Sources:
- Paul Levinson, PhD, author and professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University; interviewed, August 2020
- Andrew Peck, interdisciplinary researcher and educator; interviewed, August 2020
- Kenneth Schneyer, professor of humanities and legal studies at Johnson & Wales University; interviewed, August 2020
- NBC News: “’Make America Great Again’—Who Said It First?”
- Urban Institute: “Nine Charts about Wealth Inequality in America”
- U.S. Department of Justice: “The USA Patriot Act”
- Television Academy Foundation: “Candid Camera”
- PBS: “History of reality TV and impact on society chronicled in new book ‘Cue the Sun!’”
- U.S. Department of Justice: “Addressing Domestic Terrorism”
- National Renewable Energy Laboratory: “Solar Energy Basics”
