Lloyd Lofthouse

PC Magazine reported on 10 Sci-Fi predictions that came true. For instance, when Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963) wrote Brave New World in 1921, he was reacting to the novels of H.G. Wells (1866 – 1946), and Huxley predicted hallucinogens and psychoactive drugs—years before LSD was synthesized by Albert Hoffman.

In addition, famed sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke (1917 – 2008) predicted communications satellites in 1945. In 1965, twenty years later, that prediction became a reality.

George Orwell (1903 – 1950) in his novel 1984 (published in 1949) predicted government surveillance—then in 2013, sixty-four years later, there was the NSA spying scandal when we learned that the US government was spying on millions of American citizens without their knowledge.

What are science fiction authors writing about today that might come true in the near future?

In The Passage, a novel by Justin Cronin, manipulating the DNA of humans almost destroys mankind when U.S. government scientists secretly create a strain of human vampires.  Does this mean that one day, it might be required that children arrive with tattooed labels that indicate that are GMO free, and how close are we to children who are Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO’s)? I think the answers may shock you. In May 2000, the Center for Genetics and Society said scientists were on the verge of manipulating human DNA.

Then in February 2014, The New York Times reported on Genetically Modified Babies and said, “The F.D.A. calls them mitochondrial manipulation technologies. The procedures involve removing the nuclear material either from the egg or embryo of a woman with inheritable mitochondrial disease and inserting it into a healthy egg or embryo of a donor whose own nuclear material has been discarded. Any offspring would carry genetic material from three people — the nuclear DNA of the mother and father, and the mitochondrial DNA of the donor.”

And the Daily Mail reported that “The world’s first (30) genetically modified humans have been created … Writing in the journal Human Reproduction, the researchers, led by fertility pioneer Professor Jacques Cohen, say that this ‘is the first case of human germline genetic modification resulting in normal healthy children’.”

It doesn’t take much of a leap to imagine the CIA or NSA creating human vampires as weapons that are GMO’s and can only survive on non-GMO human blood.

The same time that I was reading The Passage by Justin Cronin, I also watched Snowpiercer, a film directed by Joon-ho Bong. Snowpiercer is set in a future where a failed climate-change experiment kills all life on the planet except for a lucky few who boarded the Snowpiercer, a train that travels around the globe and never stops.

In the real world, the BBC reported recently on the results of a climate change experiment. Fortunately the quarter-of-a-million people who took part in this Oxford University study only did it through computers compiling the most comprehensive prediction yet for the Earth’s climate up to 2080.

But in July 2013, ABC News revealed that the CIA spent $630,000 on a climate control experiment. ABC said, “The project, which is being run by the National Academy of Sciences, will spend just short of two years looking into how much humans can control weather patterns and seeing how much manipulating the atmosphere impacts climate change … scientists involved in the project will look into different types of geoengineering and weigh the risks and advantages of executing them.”

In addition, The Forbidden Knowledge.com reported that United States Secretary of Defense William Cohen apparently stated in a press briefing, while commenting on new technological threats possibly held by terrorist organizations: “Others are engaging in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, (and) volcanoes remotely, using the use of electromagnetic waves.”

Are today’s science fiction authors the canaries in the coal mine, and should we pay closer attention to what they are writing about the future—or is it already too late?

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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).

His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves

Honorable Mention in Biography/Autobiography at 2014 Southern California Book Festival

Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).

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