Science fiction is full of these. I have many favorite examples, such as "The Proud Robot" by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner & his wife, Catherine Moore), October 1943. It's set in a far future of flying cars, intelligent robots, and so on, including abandoned giant movie theaters that have been rendered obsolete by the new invention of television. But the story is about trying to figure out the real purpose of a revolutionary new robot that considers itself vastly superior to mankind. It turns out to be a mobile can opener, for opening beer cans. Of course, hardly anyone has needed can openers since pop-top cans became common in the 1950s.
The first s-f review I ever wrote was of a Furry novel, "Little Fuzzy" by H. Beam Piper in 1962. It's still excellent, set in the far future on the interstellar planet Zarathustra. There are spaceships, hover cars, and so on. But reviews since about the 1980s have pointed out how it's getting more and more dated: people play large 33 1/3 l.p. records; men are executives and women are secretaries; there is advertising everywhere for cigarettes, etc.
A favorite horrible example is the novel "Lest Darkness Fall" by L. Sprague de Camp, published in 1940. There is nothing wrong with it, but it is obviously dated. It opens in modern Rome, full of images of Mussolini's fascist Italy, and prices when the Italian lira was worth a lot. But some publisher around 1960 decided to "update" it, and did a very bad job of it. The references to fascism were removed, but Mussolini was still left as the current Prime Minister; a contemporary of John Kennedy.
But I enjoy the late 19th century non-s-f novels of Horatio Alger, Jr. for the same reason. A hamburger is a "Hamburg-style beef patty". "Lunch" and "bus" are low-class slang; the proper-English terms are "luncheon" and "omnibus". A dime is nicknamed a "shilling", and his novels written before the 1880s never refer to "nickels" because the nickel 5¢ coin was only introduced in 1883. Before that, they were silver (and a coin half the size of a dime was always getting lost), and the slang term for a silver 5¢ coin was a "sixpence". Central Park in New York was brand-new, and a good wage was $10.00 a week -- most people only earned $1.00 a day; $7.00 a week. Illinois was "the West", as distinct from "the Far West" of the other side of the Rockies.
I have said before how I read the 1948 "Space Cadet" by Robert A. Heinlein when I was nine or ten. It is set in the late 21st century, when space travel inside the orbit of Jupiter is common. There is a scene toward the beginning where the teenage hero, outdoors, gets a call on his mobile phone. I was extremely impressed by the prediction that people would have personal mobile phones that they could carry with them everyplace by the end of the 2000's. Of course, they've been common since the 1990s.
And just about all s-f written before the 1950s predicted a habitable Venus and Mars, with Venus being a steamy jungle and Mars a dry but livable desert with desert-type life forms. Isaac Asimov spent a lot of time after the late 1950s apologizing for the astrologic errors in his early s-f stories, pointing out that they had been based on the best science when they were written.
Science fiction is full of these. I have many favorite examples, such as "The Proud Robot" by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner & his wife, Catherine Moore), October 1943. It's set in a far future of flying cars, intelligent robots, and so on, including abandoned giant movie theaters that have been rendered obsolete by the new invention of television. But the story is about trying to figure out the real purpose of a revolutionary new robot that considers itself vastly superior to mankind. It turns out to be a mobile can opener, for opening beer cans. Of course, hardly anyone has needed can openers since pop-top cans became common in the 1950s.
The first s-f review I ever wrote was of a Furry novel, "Little Fuzzy" by H. Beam Piper in 1962. It's still excellent, set in the far future on the interstellar planet Zarathustra. There are spaceships, hover cars, and so on. But reviews since about the 1980s have pointed out how it's getting more and more dated: people play large 33 1/3 l.p. records; men are executives and women are secretaries; there is advertising everywhere for cigarettes, etc.
A favorite horrible example is the novel "Lest Darkness Fall" by L. Sprague de Camp, published in 1940. There is nothing wrong with it, but it is obviously dated. It opens in modern Rome, full of images of Mussolini's fascist Italy, and prices when the Italian lira was worth a lot. But some publisher around 1960 decided to "update" it, and did a very bad job of it. The references to fascism were removed, but Mussolini was still left as the current Prime Minister; a contemporary of John Kennedy.
But I enjoy the late 19th century non-s-f novels of Horatio Alger, Jr. for the same reason. A hamburger is a "Hamburg-style beef patty". "Lunch" and "bus" are low-class slang; the proper-English terms are "luncheon" and "omnibus". A dime is nicknamed a "shilling", and his novels written before the 1880s never refer to "nickels" because the nickel 5¢ coin was only introduced in 1883. Before that, they were silver (and a coin half the size of a dime was always getting lost), and the slang term for a silver 5¢ coin was a "sixpence". Central Park in New York was brand-new, and a good wage was $10.00 a week -- most people only earned $1.00 a day; $7.00 a week. Illinois was "the West", as distinct from "the Far West" of the other side of the Rockies.
I have said before how I read the 1948 "Space Cadet" by Robert A. Heinlein when I was nine or ten. It is set in the late 21st century, when space travel inside the orbit of Jupiter is common. There is a scene toward the beginning where the teenage hero, outdoors, gets a call on his mobile phone. I was extremely impressed by the prediction that people would have personal mobile phones that they could carry with them everyplace by the end of the 2000's. Of course, they've been common since the 1990s.
And just about all s-f written before the 1950s predicted a habitable Venus and Mars, with Venus being a steamy jungle and Mars a dry but livable desert with desert-type life forms. Isaac Asimov spent a lot of time after the late 1950s apologizing for the astrologic errors in his early s-f stories, pointing out that they had been based on the best science when they were written.
Fred Patten