The Future, as Foretold in the Past

The Future, as Foretold in the Past is a timeline of future events based on the stories of famous works of fiction. The article that released the infographic was from Brain Pickings; however, the creation story of the graphic is an interesting one. Giorgia Lupi saw the information just on a normal timeline on The Awl and turned it into what you see above.

There is a lot of information on the infographic, the legend above helps explain how it is organized.

Giorgia Lupi explains:

The visualization is built on a main horizontal axis depicting a distorted time-line of events (in fact we put them regularly, in sequence), starting our future-timeline in 2012. The y-axis is dedicated to the year the novel / book foretelling the event was published.

On the lower half of the visualization you can find the original quotes (shortened)

We then wanted to add further layers of analysis to our piece:

– finding out main typologies of foretold events (are they mainly social, scientific, technological, political?)

– discovering and depicting the genre of the book,

– and most of all, dividing them into positive, neutral or negative events.

Finally, good news, in 802,701 the world will still exist!

Thanks to Mike for sharing on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mikewirth/posts/10153557417821133