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Six Eerie Predictions That Early Sci-Fi Authors Got Completely Wrong

The New Yorker

Since the genre's inception, science-fiction writers have imagined what the future might hold for Earth and beyond. While their stories are often fantastical, many of them anticipated technologies that actually exist today, such as television and artificial intelligence. However, countless more made predictions that were absolute whiffs. While many sci-fi authors envisioned the possibilities of nuclear power, Philip K. Dick's "The Land That Time Remembered" got specifically stuck on the idea of a society where humans washed their hands with "soap dispensers powered by the almighty atom," and where "torrents of soap spurted forth by means of the forces that birthed the universe." Still cherished today, "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" brought us Jules Verne's dreams of electric-powered submarines, tasers, and other technologies that were unheard of in 1870.