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Comment by college_physics | Hacker News Reader

There is a bit of survivorship bias. Sci-fi has imagined every possible universe, some of the predictions feel very close to what is transpiring. And if we focus entirely on the human stories behind technological facades or other cultural variability, some people claim that all possible stories have been written already.

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As someone who saw it when it came out, no it was clear at the time that the movie was a classic and also something we would be wrestling with for a long time to come. The genetic temptations were clear, as was thousands of years of wealth and ethnic inequality. Gattaca did a great job of portraying something yet to come.

And we are still just at the beginning of our genocratic journey.

Like all great SciFi, Gattaca also portrayed the culture at the time. And this is a culture that is still with us.

I also think there is a negativity bias in effect here. I have noticed that dystopian stories like Gattaca always seem more realistic, even when they are not.

Look at 1984, it got almost all of the details wrong, and yet, many people say it is somehow visionary because it had a few things somewhat right. That's, I think, because almost all of it is negative, and because of that natural bias, we tend to think of these of more relevant.

I doubt that very much. People can always be wilder than fiction. I'm not aware of any sci-fi that predated gender fluidity, for instance.

Greg Egan's _Diaspora_ (1997) and _Oceanic_ (1998) come to my mind. Of course not really predating, with what we now recognize as gender fluidity existing for thousands of years, but in any case early texts long before the notion rose to be widely known in our culture.

Those are probably written too late, I'd say they would need to be written in 1990 or before to really count as predicting anything. Though actually, if they predict it with more accuracy and say how common it is (so it's not just the one weird character being weird, but also not being anywhere close to everyone) that might be something as well.

Fair. (In _Diaspora_ many people are; in _Oceanic_, all.)

> I'm not aware of any sci-fi that predated gender fluidity, for instance.

Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1964) had gender fluidity, before it was called that. It was central to the story.

Good point! Totally forgot about that one.

I vaguely remembered a short story where a person at a cocktail party had been a different gender the week before, although some people never changed. It might be:

> Robert Silverberg's Son of Man (1971), whose protagonist is transposed into the Far Future and there experiences a wide range of ways of being human, including being female...

See https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/transgender_sf for many entries before 1990, or even 1900.

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