At the beginning of the sudden eruption of Coronavirus, there were all kinds of conjectures and theories going viral on the internet – from the virus originating from Wuhan’s lab which accidentally escaped to the market to various other disinformation and misinformation which overshadow the very existence of the global pandemic which humans as a species are fighting.

One of which is a paragraph from a book called ‘End of Days: Predictions and Prophecies about the End of the World’ by Sylvia Browne which is believed to have predicted the global outbreak of Coronavirus.

“In around 2020, a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments. Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack again ten years later, and then disappear completely” – excerpt from the book read.

The similarity of these lines with the current scenario of COVID-19 gripping the world is uncanny. But not only ‘End of Days’, but another book which was written nearly 40 years back and believed to have predicted Coronavirus is also ‘The Eyes of Darkness’ by Dean Koontz.

“… They call the stuff ‘Wuhan-400’ because it was developed at their RDNA labs outside of the city of Wuhan, and it was the four-hundredth viable strain of man-made microorganisms created at that research center…” The internet is stumped how Wuhan-virus-labs are just rounding off the entire present-day scenario.

Though, we are not biased but intrigued enough to dig a little deeper and explore some of the other books that have predicted the decades down the road.

Books and Future Predictions

On World Book and Copyright Day, let’s look at some of the books that have predicted the future with freakish accuracy:

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1935)

In the book, Huxley predicted that in the future babies would be born in labs and how people would be sexually promiscuous in the United States and also predicted the extensive usage of birth control pills. He also predicted the modern society’s dependence on antidepressants.

Of course, the world isn’t quite to the point as written in Brave New World, but the author very accurately predicted the horror of consumerism in the contemporary society that is.

The World Set Free by H.G Wells (1913)

As petrifying as it sounds, H.G Wells wrote about atomic bombs in 1913 and how they are uranium-based and are a size of an orange. After 32 years of his prediction, the first nuclear bomb was tested in 1945 called the Enola Gay over the city of Hiroshima, Japan.

Earth by David Brin (1989)

Written in 1989, the book takes the readers to the year 2038, and the plot surrounds an artificial black hole that has fallen into the Earth’s core.

Apart from its significant scientific plot, the book reads prophecies such as climate change, global warming, and rising sea levels.

Brin also predicted something called “World Wide Web” in 1989 and right after a year WWW was actually invented by Tim Berners-Lee.

There is a website called Earth by David Brin which keeps a record of the manifestation of his predictions. So far, there are 14 predictions that have been confirmed to have come true.

The Wreck of the Titan or Futility by Morgan Robertson (1898)

In 1898, Robertson wrote Titanic in which a massive ocean liner that was considered unsinkable hit an iceberg and thousands of passengers including crew members died due to having not enough lifeboats.

In 1912, a massive one-liner which was considered unsinkable by the White Star Line was hit by an iceberg on its way from England to New York.

Leila by Prayaag Akbar (2017)

An Indian dystopian novel by Prayaag Akbar explored a totalitarian regime which hints towards a dystopic future of the nation. Set in the 2040s India called “Aryavarta” is driven by religious cults.

The novel portrays some eerie picture of religion driven society and intolerance, riots on the basis of caste and creed, and contentious democracy there is.

The novel was later adapted as a Netflix series in the same name called ‘Leila.’