HITS: Atomic submarine. Jules Verne saw it coming in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea {1870}, and called Capt. Nemo's ship, the Nautilus. Atomic bomb. H. G. Wells imagined it in The World Set Free {1914}. He described a "strange" bomb that kept exploding. If his A-bomb wasn't quite the real thing, he made up by predicting a new way to hammer the enemy: by airplane. Satellite communications. Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke came up with the "geosynchronous communication satellite" in 1945.. in a science paper, though. He wasn't fooling.

MISSES: Computers. Artificial intelligence is an idea as old as R. U. R. Rossum's Universal Robots {in the early 1920s}, a play in which the robots rebel. But science fiction missed the future of miniaturization. Computers are big, clunky things with human voices, moody attitudes and evil schemes. They don't crash, they connive. Some real person often has to disable the troublemaking computer; the answer to the computer, 'HAL 9000', in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey {1968}. And in science fiction, once somebody kills the computer, people don't worry how to get along without it. They rediscover the pencil, apparently.
 
EHH.. CLOSE: Cell phones. Capt. Kirk's flip-open communicator resembles a cell phone, and Mr. Spock's "Tricorder," an iPhone. But nobody predicted people would gab-gab-gab. Kirk out.