I t may amuse you to know that in 1865, Jules Verne wrote a story that came close to exactly predicting the moon landing. He was fuzzy on a few details, of course – the Apollo 11 mission over a century later didn’t involve the use of a giant cannon, but it did launch from Florida. The story also talked about “retrorockets” that NASA would in fact use to slow the capsule’s descent to the moon’s surface.

He wasn’t the only sciencefiction author to make scarily accurate predictions. Amid tales of flying cars and hoverboards you can find references to two moons of Mars, laser printers, and even credit cards before such things became reality.

Plus hoverboards. Yes, I’m going to keep harping on this, because here we are in the 21st century and there are still no hoverboards. Science has failed me.

The trend continues today with books like “The Martian,” set in the not-toodistant future and hinting at further unrealized technology and explorations. But for every Jules Verne and “Back to the Future” vision of a brighter future, the legacy of George Orwell and his infamous dystopia live on in novels like “The Hunger Games” and “Divergent.”

Neither genre has been entirely prophetic, thank goodness. Now that I think about it, not having hoverboards is a pretty good trade-off for free thought and the capacity to resist. Science fiction has an obsession with the future – whether for its possibilities or its pitfalls. Yet we keep arriving in “the future” only to find that it feels a lot like the “now” the stories were written in, just … the now a little bit later.

Some things may never arrive at all. Personal jet packs, for example, seem like an idea that would not end well at all. People have been talking about flying cars for almost a century and now at least prototypes exist, but they still aren’t particularly close to being tangible reality. If they did become marketable, would that be a good thing? Or would it only result in more traffic, confusion and accidents?

Other things are coming along, but slowly. We may not be ready to set up colonies and grow crops on Mars just yet, but we have an engine with a better chance of getting us there now. But then again, why go to Mars in the first place? We know less about our own oceans than we do about the surface of Mars – should we fix that?

Then there some things no one could have predicted, but here they are anyways. Twenty years ago, could anyone have even guessed at the iPad? Or the various subcultures of the Internet? What kind of technology is going to evolve in the next year, or decade, or 50 years that we have absolutely no reference for today?

Or even more incredibly – what kind of things are we going to dream of creating if all the things that we associate with “future” become reality?

– Nina Collay is a junior at Thornton Academy who can frequently be found listening to music, reading, wrestling with a heavy cello case, or poking at the keyboard of an uncooperative laptop.

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