5 eerily prophetic classics that were lightyears ahead of their time
5 eerily prophetic classics that were lightyears ahead of their time
Discover the classic novels – and the authors – whose works of fiction were written decades or even centuries ago, yet were lightyears ahead of their own eras.
Many, many authors have attempted to peer into the distant future, creating their own vision of what human society could look like aeons ahead. These writers were decades, or even centuries ahead of their contemporaries. In 1873, Jules Verne imagined a world so interconnected that you could circumnavigate it in just eighty days, Mary Shelley’s unnerving novel Frankenstein is considered a landmark of both gothic and science fiction, and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four foretold a dark future of surveillance that often resembles the modern day.
H. G. Wells is considered by many to be the father of science fiction, because his futuristic novels written in the Victorian era were so ahead of their time. From alien invasion to time travel, he paved the way for the imagination and invention we see in modern films, TV shows, games and literature.
So, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of his death we’ve curated our edit of five classic books that were so eerily ahead of their time, they’re a must-read in 2021:
‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.’