Excerpt:
Lisa Yaszek, a science-fiction-studies professor at Georgia Tech, notes that speculative fiction has also predicted remote learning and remote work, as well as social distancing to deter disease. Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1994 story “Solitude,” for example, “imagines a world in which people are socially isolated from one another, but the isolation leads to self-reliance,” Yaszek told me. And Leslie F. Stone’s “A Letter of the Twenty-Fourth Century,” written in 1929, “imagines a future where we’ve managed to beat disease and germs in part through medical intervention, but also in part through social distancing.” Stone “imagines the invention of the internet, and she imagines that in the future, there will be no crowds because everyone stays home. They get their school from the TV; they get their education from the TV. They do politics online,” Yaszek said. “And they’re not having electronic election problems in their future.”
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