In 1914's The World Set Free, H.G. Wells wrote about atomic bombs whose radioactive elements contaminate battlefields--three decades before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. British author John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar from 1968 imagined Europe's forming a collective union, China's rise as a global power, the economic decline of Detroit and the inauguration of a "President Obomi."
And, naturally, there is George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which a one-party state uses "telescreens" to identify people from their expressions and heart rate--written more than a century before NSA's Prism Surveillance Programe and China using facial recognition software to track its citizens.
Philip Oltermann, " 'At First I thought This is Absurd': The Real-Life Plan to Use Novels to Predict the Next War," The Guardian, June 26, 2021
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