Science fiction

• Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic science fiction – comprehensive listing of humanity’s worst fears
• Utopian and dystopian fiction
• Future history – list of common backgrounds created by science-fiction authors for their stories
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley in 1932 imagined a rigid, yet superficially “happy”, dystopia that controls people through a mixture of mind control and biotechnology
• Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948, by George Orwell) – a dystopian book set in Oceania, a totalitarian state that emerged in the Americas and the British Empire. The book extrapolates the reality of contemporary Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. The main protagonist is Winston Smith whose job involves supporting the historical revisionism and propaganda of the political regime. Many original concepts from the book, such as doublethink, thought crime and newspeak have since entered popular consciousness.
• Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. The new science of psychohistory can simulate history and extrapolate the present into the future.
• The author H.G. Wells wrote several works predicting future scientific advances and often exploring the problems technology cause humanity. He was especially adept at predicting the future role of airplanes in warfare. His 1901 book, Anticipations imagined trains, cars, sexual freedom, and eugenics. In The World Set Free, published in 1914, he eerily predicted the creation of the atom bomb. His 1933 work, Shape of Things to Come, foresaw the extensive use of aerial bombardment in warfare. This was later adapted into the widely seen and critically important Alexander Korda science fiction film Things to Come.
• Paris in the Twentieth Century is a science fiction novel by Jules Verne written in 1863 that features detailed descriptions of a world of glass skyscrapers, high-speed trains, automobiles, calculators, and a worldwide communications network. It was not published in Verne’s lifetime, and was only discovered by his great-grandson in 1989. It was published in 1994.
• Make Room! Make Room! – novel by Harry Harrison that predicted overpopulation in 1999 resulted in an unsuspecting population being sustained through cannibalism. Made into the movie Soylent Green.
• Logan’s Run is a novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, published in 1967. Describing a dystopian future society in which the population is kept young by euthanizing everyone who reaches a certain age. This neatly avoids the problem of overpopulation.
• Stand on Zanzibar – John Brunner‘s 1968 vision of overpopulation in 2010
• Z.P.G. (1972) on IMDb 1972 film featured an overpopulated, very polluted future Earth, whose world government practices Zero Population Growth, executing persons who violate the 30-year ban on procreation.
• The Twentieth Century (1882, by Albert Robida) – a book by a French author set in 1952 Paris, with a plethora of illustrations.