I love reading old sci fi books. They have all kinds of visions about what the future was supposed to bring. Flying cars. Dystopias. Even Pandemics. But there’s one thing those books never predicted. That a large portion of the world would believe nonsense. I have yet to read an old sci fi book from the 1950’s where a large portion of the world believed the world is flat, man never went to the moon, there’s a massive government deep state satanic pedo ring deliberately spreading a deadly virus, secret jews control the world from underground bunkers. There are plenty of books where the writers create a world where the underground secret deep state pedo ring bankers are real, but none in which people believe in it but it doesn’t really exist.

Which proves that these futurist writers have zero idea what is next. When they write a book about the future, they just take whatever modern people believe and move them around in a new world.

Even more jarring is reading a book from the 1950’s that has a future where there is rampant sexism and homophobia, and the writer doesn’t even understand that it’s in the book because they are so steeped in it they can’t recognize it. It’s like a fish that doesn’t know it’s in water.

As much as I love reading, I think movies sometimes get the feeling of the future better than books can. There are two movies I can think of that really hit home for our current times. Idiocracy and Back to the future.