Published 13:55 IST, March 16th 2020
'Frankenstein' to '1984': These novels predicted the future accurately
Many books like Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' and George Orwell's '1984' correctly predicted the future in their works of fiction. Read to know more.
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Sometimes books eerily hit the nail on the head and predicted future events accurately. While many of these themes have been written for creative purposes only, these themes or parts of the work became a reality years after the book of fiction was written. Due to this, these authors have earned a lot of fame for being visionaries.
Here are some books that predicted the future in their own ways
Frankenstein
Frankenstein is a part of gothic fiction. The book was written in the year 1818 by Mary Shelley, wife of the famous poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. In the novel, the doctor Victor Frankenstein makes a new body by using various organs from dead bodies. While this is not exactly what happens in medicine today, the book talks about organ transplantation, which became a reality later.
1984
George Orwell wrote a dystopian novel named 1984 in the year 1949. The book, while talking about how life is completely controlled by the government, introduced a lot of technologies that later became reality. It also includes artificial intelligence. Things like censorship, propaganda, surveillance, facial recognition, and speech-to-text conversion were a part of Orwell's novel way before they became a reality.
The Eyes of Darkness
Dean Koontz might have been a bigger visionary than others. The writer had come up with a novel named The Eyes of Darkness in 1981, which talked about a biological weapon named Wuhan-400. The novel looks at the story of a father who discovers that his son has been infected with a man-made microorganism called ‘Wuhan-400'. This can be connected to the COVID-19 virus that originated from Wuhan in China in 2019.
Gulliver's Travels
In the world-famous novel Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, the writer had claimed something that later turned out to be true. In the island of Laputa, which Gulliver discovers, there lived many scientists. Gulliver along with these scientists discovered that Mars has two moons. It is to be noted that the book was written in 1726, while Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos, were discovered in 1877.
13:55 IST, March 16th 2020