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Comment by Confusion | Hacker News Reader

I wonder whether you can't write this story about almost any SF author. If you write a dozen books and stories each with a plethora of new ideas, you are sure to get some things right. Pick out all the things they got right, add a few mistakes for 'balance' and tadaaa, another visionary SF author.

Has anyone done statistical analysis on the accuracy of 'predictions' by SF authors? Are some really more visionary than others?

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The difference with Brunner (or at least the 'Club of Rome quartet' Brunner; he wrote space opera too) isn't so much the prediction rate as that he covered topics like racial tensions and pollution that other speculative fiction authors largely either avoided or covered through allegorical interactions on foreign planets.

Prediction wise, he got plenty wrong and iirc explicitly disclaimed that he was making predictions so much as incorporating contemporary analysis of trends. But more importantly, he was writing about economic growth in Southeast Asia and polluted oceans and trying to get his inflation and population growth forecasts right, whilst scifi norms involved continuations of the Cold War with robots and spacecraft dogfighting like WWII fighters, post apocalyptic scenarios or futures in which the World Government sent out ships to engage in trade and conflict with space bugs in far flung star systems.

that would be a huge undertaking but I think probably the answer is that most are not that prescient, other than minor bits of prescience like making video calls or stuff like that -

Isaac Asimov - foundation series too far off to be prescient, robots future hampered by three laws of robotics not being really possible so prescience of those not very high.

Heinlein - lots of space travel, time travel, far future - does not seem very prescient.

Bradbury - major sci-fi martian chronicles, I don't think likely to be prescient.

Andre Norton - too far future to be prescient.

Ursula K. LeGuin - sci fi too far future to be prescient.

Phillip K. Dick - his artistic worldview was prescient, but that is to say he predicted a lot of the concerns of literature and pop culture in our present, but I don't think his worlds were prescient. You could also say LeGuin was prescient in the same way Dick was.

In fairness to Asimov's laws of robotics, he invented them as a device to illustrate how fundamentally flawed those sorts of rules can be. His robot stories are about how unforeseen situations create unexpected behaviour, despite apparently simple and rigid rules. He wasn't really trying to promote those laws as a practical solution to future robotics problems. He wanted a source of conflict as fuel for stories.

Perhaps I've misrecalled but I thought Asimov said something to the effect that the reason he did the 3 laws was because all robots stories were about robots going amok and making war on humanity which he found unlikely to happen because of course robots would be programmed not to do that.

His stories are also about robots running amok, so obviously he didn't think the 3 laws were a solution to that problem.

Spoiler for Dick's A Scanner Darkly:

"New Path" operating rehab centers to "help" Substance D addicts deal with their addictions is pretty similar to IRL Purdue Pharma setting up Oxy rehab centers.

ok I didn't think of that one, of course most of those guys were so prolific that it's easy to forget one or two.

Dick's 'Counter-Clock World' with the internet taking the place of the new order of dealing with nutrition.

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