10 Stories That Actually Nailed Our Future Tech

Science fiction has always been more than just cool stories – it’s often functioned as a crystal ball into humanity’s future. While everyone knows about 1984 and Brave New World, plenty of lesser-known novels made equally spot-on predictions that have since become our reality. These forgotten prophets of literature deserve some credit for their uncanny ability to envision technologies we now take for granted, sometimes decades or even centuries before they showed up in the real world.

Related: Top 15 Science Fiction Book Series

10 Edward Bellamy’s ‘Looking Backward’ (1888) Predicted Credit Cards

Way before plastic money was a thing, Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward described a cashless society where people used a card to buy stuff. He called them “credit cards” and described them working pretty much exactly like our modern debit cards nearly 70 years before they actually appeared in the 1950s. This 19th-century novel imagined citizens carrying cards that let them make purchases without physical money, with each transaction automatically recorded and subtracted from their account.

9‘The Land Ironclads’ (1903) by H.G. Wells Saw Modern Tanks Coming

Before tanks ever rumbled across WWI battlefields, H.G. Wells described these armored vehicles with surprising accuracy in his 1903 short story The Land Ironclads. Wells wrote about large, armored, self-propelled war machines that could cross rough terrain and shrug off enemy fire. What makes this so wild is that Wells described these machines more than a decade before the first actual tanks showed up in combat during World War I in 1916.

8Jonathan Swift’s ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ (1735) Somehow Guessed Mars’ Moons

In what has to be one of the most head-scratching predictions ever, Jonathan Swift correctly described that Mars has two moons in his satirical work Gulliver’s Travels – over 140 years before astronomers actually discovered them. In the book, Swift wrote that Martian astronomers had “discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve around Mars.” Scientists didn’t confirm the existence of Mars’ two moons, Phobos and Deimos, until 1877. This prediction seems to be pure dumb luck, as Swift had no telescopes or scientific data that could have revealed this astronomical reality, making it one of literature’s weirdest coincidences.

7‘Ralph 124C 41+’ (1911) by Hugo Gernsback Saw Radar Coming

Hugo Gernsback’s largely forgotten novel Ralph 124C 41+ described a technology that could detect objects at a distance using radio waves (basically radar) three decades before radar was actually invented during World War II. In the novel, Gernsback wrote about a “pulsating polarized ether wave” that could detect faraway objects, remarkably similar to how radar works today. Though hardly anyone reads the novel now, Gernsback’s tech predictions were so impressive that science fiction’s most prestigious award, the Hugo Award, bears his name.

6‘When the Sleeper Wakes’ (1899) by H.G. Wells Imagined Automatic Doors

H.G. Wells showed his remarkable foresight in When the Sleeper Wakes, where he described doors that open automatically as people approach them. Wells wrote, “The portal jerked open and revealed a narrow passage,” essentially predicting the automatic doors that wouldn’t become common until the mid-20th century. The novel follows a guy who wakes up after sleeping for 203 years to find a completely transformed world. Among its many tech predictions, this seemingly simple one has become so embedded in our daily lives that we barely even notice it anymore.

5‘Sultana’s Dream’ (1905) by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain Envisioned Solar Power

In this early feminist utopian novella, Bengali writer Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain imagined a world called Ladyland where women run society using science instead of violence. Among its forward-thinking concepts, Sultana’s Dream predicted solar power, describing technology that captured energy from the sun to cook food and power flying cars. Hossain wrote, “You see our zenana-windows are all directed towards the sun. We catch solar heat in the same way as we catch solar rays.” This surprisingly accurate description of solar energy tech came decades before practical solar cells were developed in the 1950s. The novella also predicted video calls and weather control technology.

4‘The World Set Free’ (1914) by H.G. Wells Predicted Atomic Bombs

Perhaps H.G. Wells’ most chilling prediction came in The World Set Free, where he described atomic bombs over 30 years before they became reality. Wells even used the term “atomic bombs” and predicted the devastating aftermath of nuclear war, including the dangerous radiation that hangs around after the explosion. Leo Szilard, the physicist who conceived the nuclear chain reaction, openly admitted that Wells’ novel inspired his work. In a creepy parallel to reality, Wells’ fictional bombs were first used in 1956, only 11 years off from when the first real atomic bomb was detonated in 1945.

3‘The Machine Stops’ (1909) by E.M. Forster Basically Invented Zoom Calls

E.M. Forster’s short story The Machine Stops presents a world where people live in isolation, communicating through screen-based technology that looks remarkably like today’s video calls. Written over a century ago, the story describes humanity living in individual rooms, rarely meeting face-to-face, instead using a system that allowed them to “see and hear one another, to respond to one another, so that they could have produced the same results as would have been produced by their being in the same room.” This eerily accurate prediction of Zoom meetings and our screen-dependent world came decades before television was invented and over a century before video conferencing became our daily routine.

2‘The Sack’ (1950) by William Morrison Foresaw Google

William Morrison’s short story The Sack features an entity capable of answering any factual question instantly, essentially predicting Google and modern search engines four decades before they existed. In the story, “The Sack” is a brain-like living organism that stores all human knowledge and can be asked questions on any subject, providing immediate answers. Morrison’s prediction is particularly impressive as it came before the internet or even personal computers were a thing. The concept of having instant access to the world’s collected knowledge seemed purely fantastical in 1950 but is now something most of us carry around in our pockets.

1‘The Age of the Pussyfoot’ (1965) by Frederik Pohl Predicted Smartphones

Frederik Pohl’s novel The Age of the Pussyfoot features a device called a “Joymaker” that works remarkably like today’s smartphones. The Joymaker is a handheld device that functions as a communication tool, provides information, makes purchases, monitors health, controls home environments, and even arranges social activities. Pohl described it as “a telephone, reference library, relaxation device, newspaper, banking-and-purchasing terminal, medical monitor and warning system.” This comprehensive prediction of smartphone functionality came decades before the first iPhone dropped in 2007, accurately foreseeing how these devices would become essential, all-in-one tools that we now can’t imagine living without.