Sci-fi author, John Brunner, wrote a novel in 1968 called “Stand on Zanzibar”
He writes about life in 2010 where he describes the following:
- Wearable technology
- Pharmaceuticals to improve sexual performance advertised on TV
- The most powerful U.S. rival no longer being the Soviet Union, but rather China.
- Video calls and Virtual Avatars
- Bisexual and gay relationships have become mainstream.
- Documents form laser printers
- The legalization of cannabis
- Global news and TV on demand
- Tabaco declining and marijuana rising
- Detroit has become a ghost town and incubator of a new kind of music oddly similar to the actual Detroit techno movement of the 1990s.
- Terrorists attack buildings within the country and pose an increasing threat to US interests.
- School and mass shootings happen all over the place.
- Cars are powered by rechargeable electric fuel cells.
- Blacks have moved into positions of power as a result of affirmative action.
- Aeroplanes offer inflight entertainment with news and video programs on screens at each individual seat.
Where this gets stranger
The US having a leader named President Obomi, who was dealing with a lot instability and violence.
He talks about a European union of nations to improve their economic prospects and influence on world affairs. Keep in mind that The EU and European citizenship were established when the Maastricht Treaty came into force in 1993
The novel centers on two New York City roommates
- Donald
- Norman
“A possible refrence to Donald Trump and the normal man (common man)”
Reality Decoded 
IMHO Brunner was the most prophetic and one of the most innovative of the sci-fi authors I’m familiar with. The Shockwave Rider predicts computer hackers and viruses (called ‘worms’ in the novel) and prefigures the cyberpunk genre. The Sheep Look up predicts the destruction of the environment by industrialisation (not so prophetic by 1972), the cynical and ineffective response by authorities and the rise of ecoterrorism, Stand on Zanzibar was the first Brunner book I read and, as a 12 year old aspiring writer, it changed my entire concept of what a novel could be, thanks to its multiple interweaving plot lines and a structure I’d never seen nor imagined in any book.
But I think it’s easy to overestimate Brunner’s precognition. He was well plugged in to social, demographic and technological developments and used them to inform his profligacy of ideas. Some of those ideas seem uncannily accurate in retrospect but many others are way off the mark. To suggest he predicted the Obama presidency because he wrote of a fictional character with a similar name (but nothing else in common) is drawing a pretty long bow.
Belief in ESP is largely driven by the way we seek patterns and spot commonalities while discarding a huge trove of information in which we can’t see any such significance. Noting the ‘accurate’ predictions in Stand on Zanzibar – a huge slab of a book with a high density of ideas – while paying little attention to all the ‘inaccurate’ ones and concluding there must be something uncanny about it is an example of that sort of thinking.
BTW, the EEC and eventually the EU was the stated intent of the 1957 Treaty of Rome. The EU was eminently predictable by the time Brunner wrote Stand on Zanzibar.
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By 1968 Detroit was already the incubator of two new forms of music created by the cross pollination of urban black and working class white musical forms. They were called ‘Motown’ and ‘Detroit Rock’, both of which were hugely influential on subsequent popular music. Most immediately and obviously Motown engendered Disco while Detroit Rock gave rise to Punk Rock.
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Yes but I think the techno that was created there was absent of any roots and that’s what made it unique. A new form of hypnotic waveform.
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Gotta admit I’m not across Detroit techno – unlike Detroit Rock, which is an obsession of mine – but there was certainly hypnotic electronic music around in the mid-60s that a sci-fi author would likely have been aware of.
If not the early psychedelic Krautrock of Tangerine Dream and Can (both heavily influenced by sci-fi themes) then certainly the theremin heavy soundtracks of 50s and 60s sci-fi movies and TV programs (think The Day the Earth Stood Still or Forbidden Planet).
It wouldn’t have taken a huge leap of 1968 sci-fi imagination to arrive at a hypnotic, futuristic, electronic music form emerging from the musically creative hotbed of Detroit.
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You Stated — “It wouldn’t have taken a huge leap of 1968 sci-fi imagination to arrive at a hypnotic, futuristic, electronic music form emerging from the musically creative hotbed of Detroit.”
My Response — I give you that possibility but to put the president in the same year with a name like Obomi is a very low probability.
The reason he is so interesting is not because of one prediction (in fiction writing) but the fact that he got 17 direct hits.
Context is king and if he wins one round of slot machine pulls at the casino then we are not impressed but to win 17 rounds of slots in the same night brings the bouncers directly to you.
It is highly unlikely for someone to win that many rounds of slots in one sitting.
Just saying
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Depends how many coins he puts in. Like I said, Stand on Zanzibar is a very big novel packed with ideas, the overwhelming majority of which never came to pass. And it’s not like he’s choosing them at random like someone pulling a one-armed bandit. Brunner was well plugged in to a wide range of technological, social and cultural trends. ‘Obomi’ seems an amazing coincidence taken on its own, but how many prominent people are mentioned in the book? You’ve gotta discount that coincidence by the number of celebrities he mentions whose names aren’t similar to their 2010 counterparts.
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You Stated — “‘Obomi’ seems an amazing coincidence taken on its own, but how many prominent people are mentioned in the book?”
My Response — And there lies the rub of a very human response and why AI is so much more effective at mining unstructured data. AI doesn’t focus on what doesn’t work, it only closes in on what does.
https://realitydecoded.blog/2020/06/07/pre-911-unstructured-datar-review/
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You Stated — “Belief in ESP is largely driven by the way we seek patterns and spot commonalities while discarding a huge trove of information in which we can’t see any such significance. ”
My Response — ESP is an outdated answer to a now know fact of unstructured data. We now benefit from the mining of what is known as “Big Data” but the truly new profitable source of revenue comes from “Unstructured Data”.
AI has been instrumental in the discovery of information once thought to be white noise (usles information or random patterns) but AI is able to use that data to solve complex problems or generate new sources of revenue.
It does this by ignoring perception and focusing only on results. We as human beings have a drive to know “why” something is but AI only needs to know “what” something provides.
It doesn’t care if it understands it or where it came from or what agenda it has, it only needs to know what it can produce and if it can utilize the resource.
This has created a new science and a new field of research, Data Scientist being one of them (like me (in training)).
https://realitydecoded.blog/category/unstructured-data/
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