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Q&A Should I be concerned with my fiction writing containing accidental prophecies of real world events?

@Michael made a good point about some writers being good students of history. Consider it a complement! Consider also that stories with a sufficient amount of complexity are statistically likely t...

posted 7y ago by Columbia says Reinstate Monica‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

Answer
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T06:53:43Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29758
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar Columbia says Reinstate Monica‭ · 2019-12-08T06:53:43Z (almost 5 years ago)
@Michael made a good point about some writers being good students of history. Consider it a complement!

Consider also that stories with a sufficient amount of complexity are statistically likely to get some things right and some things wrong (e.g. see the [Law of Large Numbers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers) ). Star Trek is famous for getting a few things right (e.g. handheld communication devices and tablet PC's), while getting quite a number of things wrong (e.g. the Eugenics Wars of the 1990's). Even if you seem to "predict" a near-future event, you are still not likely to get _all_ the details correct. Maybe you write a story about a North Korean missile hitting Hokkaido, and then real life unfolds and a real North Korean missile hits Kyoto next year.

Consider those things in your book that have _not_ come true. What would the situation be if those things had come true and the things that actually _did_ come true had not? Would you still have posted your question? If so, you may have a quite normal and healthy dose of being able to predict some things and failing to predict others!

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2017-08-15T01:06:27Z (over 7 years ago)
Original score: 1