Just picked up Shadow of the Wind at a library sale. Has to wait til I’m finished with The Monarch Papers 1&2. 
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Clariel. And now I’ve added another book to my wishlist, because I didn’t realize that Nix wrote another Old Kingdom novel after Clariel.
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Oh god I didn’t realise Goldenhand existed until now. Guess I should re-read the series first to refresh my memory!
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I’m reading N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy at the moment and adoring it! In between books at the moment because I had to prioritise research but I’m so excited to get back into the story. Her narrative style is So unique and exciting to read.
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So I just started reading July 20, 2019 by Arthur C. Clarke. I grabbed off Dad’s bookshelf to skim through and maybe laugh at the silly predictions of what life would be like this year but I am actually kind of shocked? Take this passage for example;
Every forty years, as if cyclically programmed, our nation seems to undergo a crisis of values that threatens its most sturdy social foundations. In the 1920s, the proliferation of assembly-line automobiles and the explosive growth of the city threatened the moral fiber of a small-town America that had predominated since colonial days. The flapper of the Roaring Twenties tore off her corset as defiantly as the hippie of the late sixties burned her bra, as vehemently as the greenie of 2011 rejected her mother’s synthetic clothes.
This book was published in 1986 and casually predicted the environmental movement in order to emphasize a different point. 
I’m still only on page 20.
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Okay this is rediculous.
Are we sure time travel isn’t a thing? Because my Google Home does all those things listed.
Edit: 2 pages later, the book predicts the Roomba.
Parked out of sight in a closet would be your robot vacuum cleaner. According to a preprogrammed schedule, it would roll out of the closet, cruise over a premapped course on the floor, and do the week’s cleaning.
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What the… How the… Excuse me? This was written in 1986? Man’s a wizard. Only explanation.
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Well George Orwell predict the future in his book 1984
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I should probably say that he didn’t get everything right, but what he does, he is very specific about. He seems to have overestimated our travel speeds (cars running at Mach 3) and is really certain that videodiscs will be very common and useful, but there’s something every few pages that just hits me with a sudden
“This is how it is! How could he know that!?!”
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I’m very, very thankful that cars don’t go Mach 3.
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I think while he gave pretty realistic (and scarily accurate) predictions for everyday life, he is quite certain that we must start colonizing the moon by 2019 and so I think that’s accelerated his timeline transportation-wise.
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I think I heard something about trying to Colonize another celestial body but I think that’s in the coming years according to whatever it was. I’ll look for it and maybe create a topic for sciencey stuff if we don’t have one.
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Do you guys remember the smart TV scare a couple of years ago? Well Orwell predict that telescreens would be found in everyones homes for entertainment. But that the TVs would also watch and listen to everything you did which is exactly what happened with Samsung and a few others.
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I actually don’t remember that, although then again ive always had the mindset that if a company wants to watch me sit on my couch watching Top Gun, Ladder 49 or Lord of the Rings etc. for the 749th time so be it.
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@Ignatius: there’s serious discussion about the colonization of Mars, even to the point that NASA is holding a closed competition for prefab home designs.
@Rimor: Remember the movie Batman Forever? Remember the TVs?
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I don’t believe I’ve seen the film 
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Speaking of colonizing Mars, there’s a phone game, TerraGenesis, that simulates colonizing other planets. It’s kinda neat, if people wanna check it out.
And @Sellalellen it’s alwats interesting to see what older authors get right and wrong about the future. Discs seem especially prominent in older fiction, which tells you just how unpredictable cloud storage was in the common perception. 
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I’ve played TerraGenesis, but it couldn’t hold my attention.
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This looks like such a good book! I’m excited to find myself a copy.
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Also, finished Flora and Fauna and starting Cosmos and Time. After that, I might take a swing at The Hate U Give.
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