BLOUDER Literary has a mention in Hugo Gernsback’s novel ‘Ralph124c 41+’ This has a description of a device called ‘telephot’ that let people have eye contact while speaking across long distances. Now ‘Skype’, Duo, IMO and other media have become standard means for long distance communication.
attempting to acquire nuclear weapons at any cost! In 1949, George Orwell wrote a book ‘1984’ in which he wrote about a dystopian world under surveillance by an interconnected web of security cameras. Back then this idea was absurd for many in the society. But now it has become a reality! Now there are surveillance cameras at most of the public and private spaces and agencies keep a watch on us and track people. An envision of a future war machines is also attributed to the English writer, H.G. Wells who has authored famous novels such as The Invisible man
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January 2018
(1897) and The War of the Worlds (1897). In 1903 a story ‘The Land Ironclads’ written by him appeared in the December issue of Strand magazine. He wrote about terrestrial war machines called tanks that were enormously large. They were 100 feet long and rolled on 18 pairs of wheels each having their own independent turning axle unlike the modern day tanks which have caterpillar tracks. The first Army tanks rolled in to the battlefield in 1916 in the battle of Somme. And they are in use ever since. Who would have thought that the use of video call would have been envisaged by a writer long before its turning in to reality? But trust me it did happen! It
Now you might be thinking what methods, sutras or shaastra these sci-fi writers would have used to predict the events of the future? They use no technique at all as in case of astrologers. It’s just their power of imagination and assessment. But still arguable is the assumption that, were they gifted with prophetic visions? I don’t know. But I believe that they were visionaries and they were the one who had the ability to assess their present technological scope and knowledge prevailing in their times. They somehow with the help of this unique ability imagined how our future is going to take shape. They made many predictions that turned out to be true! So what’s next? Will we encounter an invisible person someday in future? Who knows? H G Wells with the help of a character Griffin (who is a scientist) describes that if a person’s refractive index changes exactly same to the refractive index of air and their body doesn’t reflect or absorb any amount of light then they will turn Invisible! Or who knows that someday some evil and voracious alien species might arrive to invade our Earth with evil intentions and start our extermination? As written in the novel War of the Worlds! Well! I am not being dystopian but the truth is anything can happen.