AgProv
Doctor of Disorientation Studies, UnseenUniversity
- Joined
- Apr 6, 2014
- Messages
- 1,330
- Location
- too North to be Midlands, too south to be North
This was in the Guardian today: a genuinely interesting bit of lateral thinking in Germany based on the fortean observation of "how did this author make such a spookily accurate prediction years before the event, even if they genuinely only believed they were writing fiction? What could be causing this, and, most crucially, how do we pick up on what fiction authors could be writing now, or in the recent past, which is coming true or will be truth within the next few years?"
We've all got our own favourite examples: the writer in the 1890's who wrote that warning fable about hubris, where the "unsinkable ship" on its maiden voyage crashes into an iceberg in the Atlantic with great loss of life. Mine is the Victorian steampunk scifi writer who, in a novel in around 1890, predicted the first powered flight in a heavier-than-air manned craft would be in 1903.
The authors of this article cite
John Brunner’s Stand On Zanzibar from 1968 imagined Europe’s states forming a collective union, China’s rise as a global power, the economic decline of Detroit and the inauguration of a “President Obomi”.
With the backing of the German government, this (funding-threatened) literature department at a German university chose to justify its own continued and cash-threatened existance by asking - how do we identify these literary predictions from the mass of writings produced each year? How do we quantify them, objectively assess them, explore the interlinks between them and correlate them to real-world news and trends? If we make it a long-term study over a period of years, where can we go with this?
This is what emerged.
the Cassandra Project
We've all got our own favourite examples: the writer in the 1890's who wrote that warning fable about hubris, where the "unsinkable ship" on its maiden voyage crashes into an iceberg in the Atlantic with great loss of life. Mine is the Victorian steampunk scifi writer who, in a novel in around 1890, predicted the first powered flight in a heavier-than-air manned craft would be in 1903.
The authors of this article cite
John Brunner’s Stand On Zanzibar from 1968 imagined Europe’s states forming a collective union, China’s rise as a global power, the economic decline of Detroit and the inauguration of a “President Obomi”.
With the backing of the German government, this (funding-threatened) literature department at a German university chose to justify its own continued and cash-threatened existance by asking - how do we identify these literary predictions from the mass of writings produced each year? How do we quantify them, objectively assess them, explore the interlinks between them and correlate them to real-world news and trends? If we make it a long-term study over a period of years, where can we go with this?
This is what emerged.
the Cassandra Project
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