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frmersdogtoday at 2:04 PM5 repliesview on HN

Off the top of my head, events in popular science fiction that have "already occurred":

  First Laughing Man Incident - Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (2024)

  Third Impact - Neon Genesis Evangelion (2015)

  Fourth Corporate War - Cyberpunk (2022)

  Geisel Library Walk - Rainbows End (2025)

  2020 Tokyo Olympics - Akira (2020)

Replies

ben_wtoday at 2:51 PM

> Rainbows End

Very good timing, not for walking houses and sharding of consensus reality with ubiquitous AR, but for physical destruction of books to speed up scanning.

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jodrellblanktoday at 6:55 PM

Domingo Gonsales is flown to the moon by tying himself to wild swans, and meets Lunar Christians - The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin (1601)

Manned mission to the Moon by giant gun - Jules Verne (1865 ish).

Manned trip around Saturn by comet - Jules Verne (1877).

Time traveller sets off to the future - H.G. Wells (1894)

Martian invasion of Earth - War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1905)

Global telephone network reaches as many connections as a human brain and wakes up - Dial 'F' for Frankenstein, Arthur C Clarke (December 1, 1975)

Birth of Dr Susan Calvin, founding of US Robotics & Mechanical Men, development of 'Positronic Brain' - Asimov's robot stories (1982 and after)

British space station under construction - The Outward Urge by John Wyndham (1994)

Portal to parallel universes - Sliders (1994)

Doctor Samuel Beckett steps into the Quantum Leap Accelerator and vanishes - Quantum Leap (1995)

Skynet becomes self-aware - Terminator 2 Judgement Day (August 29, 1997. at 02:14 am Eastern Time)

HAL 9000 AI computer operational (1997), first human voyage to Jupiter system (2001), first landing on Europa and alien life discovered (2010) - Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 A Space Odyssey

Moon leaves Earth Orbit after nuclear waste explosion, taking human-occupied Lunar colony with it - Space:1999 (13 September 1999)

Efficient international flight, using Zeppelins and blimps - Rudyard Kipling (2000)

Global climate disaster - The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

Replicants - Bladerunner (2016)

Keanu Reeves smuggles digital information in his brain - Johnny Mnemonic (2021)

Arnold Schwarzenegger kills to survive in a typical American TV show - The Running Man (2025)

Woman relifed into robot, rich people discover workers' rights - Fritz Lang's Metropolis (2026)

First colony mission to Mars, 100 colonists on the largest spaceship ever built - Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars (2026)

Tibetan monks finish listing all the names of God, stars start going out - The Nine Billion Names of God, Arthur C. Clarke (when computers were rentable and could print 1000 names per second)

and many more: https://scifi.fandom.com/wiki/Timeline_of_fictional_future_e...

purpleflame1257today at 5:11 PM

The Olympics were canceled(postponed) due to a plague, so that tracks

hcstoday at 3:31 PM

Events of Back to the Future II (2015-10-21)

bell-cottoday at 4:49 PM

Perhaps dating myself...

2001: A Space Odyssey (2001)