Thirty years ago this month the first film in the Back to the Future franchise hit the screens when director Robert Zemeckis sent Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) back to 1955. Time travel, and its myriad implications, is usually difficult to grasp and full of migraine-inflicting paradoxes – the brilliant sci-fi film primer claims to get around some of those. Back to the Future was not, however, a heady exploration into time travel by any means, but for millions of mainly young people it helped make the past and future possible to imagine.

Back to the Future II was the film in the series that really piqued our interest when Marty was sent into the future to make things right; 2015 to be exact. While time machines are definitely not something we expect to be seeing in stores any time soon, some of the actual gadgets in Back to the Future II have appeared on the market. A recent Mashable story gives us seven such gadgets, comparisons to Google Glass, biometrics, self-lacing shoes (not yet out, but Nike is working on it), hands-free gaming, and video chats (ATT&T actually demonstrated something called a “Picturephone“in 1964 at the World’s Fair in New York, the first ever use of a videophone. It never took off).

Four writers who predicted the future of tech

Ray Bradbury

Many others came before Zemeckis and his co-writers in writing stories about the things we’ll be using in the future. One of those people is sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury. In his most celebrated novel, Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian story in which all books are banned and burned in the USA, Bradbury predicted earphones. Describing ear-buds that looked like “little shells,” Bradbury writes that you could slip them into your ear and hear an “electronic ocean of sound.” He wrote that sometimes prior to the book’s publication in 1953, a long time before anything actually appeared as a consumer gadget.

Bradbury’s characters also used huge, flatscreen TVs at a time when the television was a meager box containing black and white pictures. These screens were in use constantly, giving the viewer ostensibly what they wanted. Yet Bradbury points out that such invasive technology might also create its own kind of loneliness if overused, something we all might heed, if it’s not too late.

In Bradbury’s short story called The Pedestrian, he sees a future that includes The Internet of Things (IoT), consisting of cars that can drive and even think for themselves. While Google’s ‘autonomous’ Lexus 4x4s haven’t been making arrests, as a car did in The Pedestrian, they have been getting progressively better and can now be seen cruising around parts of California. You might remember self-driving cars in all sorts of sci-fi films – remember Total Recall, the original – but it was Bradbury whose vision other writers re-created. Bradbury also wrote about electronic surveillance, artificial intelligence and the use of ATMs a long time before those things became a fixture (or possibility) in our lives.

Philip K. Dick

The above movie Total Recall was based on a short story called We Can Remember It for You Wholesale by one of the world’s best sci-fi novelists Philip K. Dick. Dick’s predictions – some say paranoia – were so good he felt that he was too close to something, which resulted in what he thought was the burglarizing of his home. His work often depicted hyper surveillance technology and sometimes included thinking and feeling androids – someone actually made a Philip K. Dick android (above), although he doesn’t seem to do much more than look creepy. His genius is more concerned with ethics, in how much information we give away, and how much is taken from us, often – as the NSA might say – for our own good.

Dick wrote about virtual reality, such as VR memories implanted in our brains, and also holograms (see HoloLens), such as in his short story Minority Report and the film it later became.

But it was his profound distrust of authority that might be even more relevant to the world in which we now live. At least one of his darker misgivings about technology has come true: “There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me.’”

H. G. Wells

British writer H. G. Wells, circa 1900, is perhaps most well-known for his novel The Time Machine, a book that is generally thought to have brought time travel into the general public’s consciousness. As we’ve already said, time machines are purely fictional, but much of what Wells envisioned has come true.

The ray gun is one of his fictional inventions. A ray gun was used in his 1898 book, The War of the Worlds, to repel the invading aliens. He describes the gun as “an almost noiseless and blinding flash of light.” The US military already has something called the Active Denial System (ADS), a gun that fires non-lethal rays at crowds in order to disperse them. Wells envisioned the mobile phone too. In his novel The Shape of Things to Come, his characters use communication devices strapped to their wrists, while in his book Men Like Gods (1923) he imagines wireless communication used by the public.

Arthur C. Clarke

There’s a great clip (1974) on YouTube when the British sci-fi author predicts the Internet and life in 2001. He talks about the possibility of being able to live “anywhere we like” due to the personal computer devices we will all own. He talks of a small “friendly console” that will help us to receive “all the information” we need for our everyday lives, such as “bank statements, theater reservations, all the information you need in order to live in a complex, modern society.” As Clarke speaks, giant computers, nothing like his small consoles, hum in the background.

He may have predicted the PC and Internet communication, but he’s also often quoted as saying this: “If by some miracle some prophet could describe the future exactly as it was going to take place, his predictions would sound so absurd, so far-fetched that everyone would laugh him to scorn.”

However, when asked at the World’s Fair in New York (same place where we saw the videophone) what life would be like in 2014, he made some astounding predictions. These included working collaboratively from different places in the world and communications satellites. He explained that in 2014 we will live in a shrunken world “in which we can be in instant contact wherever we may be. Where we can contact our friends anywhere on earth, even if we don’t know their actual physical location. It will be possible in that age, possibly 50 years from now, for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali just as well as he could from London.”

Proof of this, is the story you’ve just finished.

Photo credits: Rasmus Lerdorf, Juan de Dios Santander, Kieran Guckian, Frederic Guillory, James Vaughan