What Science Fiction Movie or Novel Is Most Prescient Today? | Hacker News Reader

What Science Fiction Movie or Novel Is Most Prescient Today?

nytimes.com

42 pointswalterbell64 comments

'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.

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

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

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

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.

And Mescaline.

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2006/aug/12/sciencefictionfa...

Dick was a true seer.

And a well researched rebuttal to the above article http://ubikcan.blogspot.com/2006/08/philip-k-dick-and-drugs-...

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

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.

The thoughtcrime, two-minute hates, groupthink, and newspeak are still very relevant, I think.

Social Media, and in particular Twitter, is eerily reminiscent of the two minutes of hate.

What are we outraged about today? Game journalists? BLM? Headdresses? Benghazi?

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.

> "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...

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

I found BNW surprisingly juvenile. It started off really cool and detailed, talking about how factories worked and the helicopters and real vivid imagery. Then then rest of the book was basically teen paperback story.

It's also pretty closely related to the current political and social situation. Tons of surveillance and spying, lots of attempts at 'newspeak' from both sides of the political spectrum, more and more over the top laws implemented 'because of terrorism'.

I really liked the break down of the low, middle and high class fluctuation that is broken by perpetual "WAR" on "something". I feel now more then ever we are trying to grasp at a WAR to unite the people under specific goals (or a political party) so that only a certain group of people can benefit. There is no longer not war, just who is the next target. "War is Peace" as they say in the book.

I always found this comic that illustrates why Huxley was probably right and Orwell wrong useful: http://media.johnlaudun.org/wordpress/media/2013/08/orwell-h...

This is great, though I tend to read it as saying both were right, but Huxley was more so.

every time i buy gasoline i think of winston and his chocolate

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).

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. ;)

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

A: Brave New World

I'm somewhat dismayed to find Huxley's work not mentioned at all in the article.

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.

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.

> "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

I think the Brave New World comparisons are lazy. If people engaging in pleasurable things and people having a comfortable place in society is the criterion, "good government" becomes indistinguishable from "totalitarian government." There is more to that book. In BNW, the government used artificial or stylized pleasures (drugs; emotionless, recreational sex) to destroy individual autonomy, traditional families, and organic social structures.

Our society, in contrast, condemns the instruments used by the government in BNW. We idolize work and glorify working families. We legislate "for the children." We frown upon sex outside of emotionally-involved relationships. We make escapism through drug use illegal. Now, our society has its own modes of indoctrination, but they are rather different than anything in BNW.

This comic about the ideas of the book "Amusing ourselves to death" may answer your question http://www.avianbonesyndrome.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/...

  “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.

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

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

Most recently I saw this http://www.teslasuit.com/

I want that for driving simulators.

How far are we from balance, equilibrium and acceleration virtualization ?

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

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

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.

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

Surprised there's no fans of :

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

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.

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

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

"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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Currently reading Rainbows End.

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

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

Stand on Zanzibar John Brunner

Neuromancer by William Gibson

Brazil. Definitely Brazil.

idiocracy

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.

and in the end the film remains hopeful of the future

i remember reading the controversy surrounding corporations' offering an egg freezing plan and thinking to myself, 'i was unaware that was even a thing'

then some time later i was having a reviewing of idiocracy and i realised i had heard of egg freezing plans before

because i know i had seen the film before and the film was referencing the option

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