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The Expected World

What This Is

An archival publication that surfaces texts originally written about the future — predictions, forecasts, policy projections, fictional imaginings — each anchored to a specific date or period that has now elapsed.

The site exists to create a particular kind of encounter: a reader meets a mind from the past speaking confidently, or anxiously, or hopefully, about a moment the reader has already lived through. The gap between expectation and outcome is the editorial territory.

How Entries Are Selected

Every entry must satisfy four criteria. The source text must reference a specific future date, year, or bounded period. The source must be verifiable. And the pairing of prediction and elapsed reality must reward attention.


Contact & Submissions

If you have found a passage that meets our criteria, we would like to hear about it. Submit a passage.

For other inquiries: contact@theexpectedworld.com

2072If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution,…
1980Why did I pick on the next nine years instead of the next 900 for finding a…
1981In twenty years, the USSR will be producing almost twice as much industrial…
1888At present weapons are being changed every ten years, and even more frequently.…
1960Once we recognise this with all the clearness that the clearness of the fact…
1968I pour my crisis regarding democratic thinking and universal feeling onto paper…
1934So, one after another, either as pilots or passengers, will the members of the…
2025We will start to see some forms of robot sex appearing in high-income, very…
1965Two or three years ago, it appeared that automatic recognition of sizeable…
2019After sixty years of devoted service, Moore's Law will die a dignified death no…
2000These societies, these generations which no longer expect anything from some…
2000Dismisssing the Italian or Continental look of the 1950’s (Italy is third in…
2072If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution,…
1980Why did I pick on the next nine years instead of the next 900 for finding a…
1981In twenty years, the USSR will be producing almost twice as much industrial…
1888At present weapons are being changed every ten years, and even more frequently.…
1960Once we recognise this with all the clearness that the clearness of the fact…
1968I pour my crisis regarding democratic thinking and universal feeling onto paper…
1934So, one after another, either as pilots or passengers, will the members of the…
2025We will start to see some forms of robot sex appearing in high-income, very…
1965Two or three years ago, it appeared that automatic recognition of sizeable…
2019After sixty years of devoted service, Moore's Law will die a dignified death no…
2000These societies, these generations which no longer expect anything from some…
2000Dismisssing the Italian or Continental look of the 1950’s (Italy is third in…
2072If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution,…
1980Why did I pick on the next nine years instead of the next 900 for finding a…
1981In twenty years, the USSR will be producing almost twice as much industrial…
1888At present weapons are being changed every ten years, and even more frequently.…
1960Once we recognise this with all the clearness that the clearness of the fact…
1968I pour my crisis regarding democratic thinking and universal feeling onto paper…
1934So, one after another, either as pilots or passengers, will the members of the…
2025We will start to see some forms of robot sex appearing in high-income, very…
1965Two or three years ago, it appeared that automatic recognition of sizeable…
2019After sixty years of devoted service, Moore's Law will die a dignified death no…
2000These societies, these generations which no longer expect anything from some…
2000Dismisssing the Italian or Continental look of the 1950’s (Italy is third in…
2072If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution,…
1980Why did I pick on the next nine years instead of the next 900 for finding a…
1981In twenty years, the USSR will be producing almost twice as much industrial…
1888At present weapons are being changed every ten years, and even more frequently.…
1960Once we recognise this with all the clearness that the clearness of the fact…
1968I pour my crisis regarding democratic thinking and universal feeling onto paper…
1934So, one after another, either as pilots or passengers, will the members of the…
2025We will start to see some forms of robot sex appearing in high-income, very…
1965Two or three years ago, it appeared that automatic recognition of sizeable…
2019After sixty years of devoted service, Moore's Law will die a dignified death no…
2000These societies, these generations which no longer expect anything from some…
2000Dismisssing the Italian or Continental look of the 1950’s (Italy is third in…
0000
WRITTEN: 1929
ADDRESSED TO: 2029
Moreover, in a hundred years, I thought, reaching my own doorstep, women will have ceased to be the protected sex. Logically they will take part in all the activities and exertions that were once denied them. The nursemaid will heave coal. The shop-woman will drive an engine. All assumptions founded on the facts observed when women were the…

Virginia Woolf

A Room of One's Own, Chapter 3 (Hogarth Press, 1929)

Woolf delivered A Room of One's Own as lectures at Cambridge in October 1928. Her argument is about women's access to money and intellectual space, but here she allows herself a rare flight of predictive fancy. The tone is deliberately ambivalent. She's testing a hypothesis to its logical extremity: if protection is the mechanism of inequality, what happens when the protection is removed? She assumes women's longer lives are an artifact of their sheltered existence, that biology is merely circumstance. The feminist argument of her era required this assumption.

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