Despite my strong public advocacy of Lab Lit fiction, I have always been a huge science fiction fan too. As a family, we spent the 1970s clustered around the TV watching (the original versions of) Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Space: 1999 and many others in the genre. Being taken to see the first Star Wars movie at the age of nine was akin to a religious experience for me.

I devoured the genre in print, too. My father subscribed to Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, which I read cover to cover religiously from about the age of seven until I left home to attend university. Not satiated, I used to go to the library every week and check out a stack of SF so high that the librarian had to crane her neck to make eye contact with the child behind it: Herbert, Bradbury, Heinlein, LeGuin, Cherryh, Asimov, easily thousands of classics devoured throughout my school years.

SF excels at stretching the imagination by showing us a world that might one day be, and if it's done properly, we as readers long to be in the characters' shoes to enjoy it – or in the case of dystopian scenarios, hope against hope that the day will never come. A quick internet search reveals many lists of technology that SF writers correctly predicted, and even a whole book of them.

Although Robert Heinlein got Google down pat in his novel Friday, he was pretty off on a lot of his other predictions, such as those he listed in 1949 for the year 2000. I'm afraid we haven't conquered all cancers, found life on Mars or yet enjoy ready transport between planets for all – in fact the only thing he got right in a list of 19 items was the mobile phone, voicemail and the fact that civilization did not destroy itself. (Incidentally, he also predicted eight things that man would never accomplish, two of which – making life in the lab, and creating manlike robots – I suspect we are close to, or already, proving him wrong on.)

Although it's fun to see predictions come true, I am in fact fascinated by examples where SF get things completely off, where obsolescence creeps into an otherwise futuristic setting and pops your suspended disbelief like a soap bubble. It tells you as much about contemporary life and attitudes of the author as it does about our futures. The otherwise gritty realism in the film Until The End of The World, in which the characters communicate in payphones with video screens, seemed amazingly high-tech when I saw it first in 1991. I even remember thinking that the payphones being grotty and clapped out was a nice touch– somehow much more realistic than any glittering, silvery Jetson's-style affair. But now, when payphones are extinct, the entire concept seems misjudged. Yes, we have video messaging, but nobody makes calls from public boxes anymore – we have our mobile communication devices. Gene Roddenberry got it right, but not Wim Wenders.

An even more glaring bubble-pop happened when I was watching Blade Runner (The Director's Cut) the other day. I could forgive Rick Deckard slouching against a wall reading his (paper) newspaper – it somehow worked in the retro ghettoized futurescape of LA's Chinatown. But the smoking! Indoors! In your place of employment! It seems clear by the costumes and hairstyles that Ridley Scott was going for a 1940s noir look, but in 1982 he utterly failed to foresee that particular cultural revolution, which is now so entrenched that watching the characters puff away, especially in the high-tech office spaces of the Tyrell Corporation, seems more alien than little green men on the moon.

So how's it looking for 2013, from the eyes of past fiction writers? There's already a list from io9 which makes for pretty depressing reading – definitely more on the apocalypse end of the SF scale than the jetpack. My favorite of these is from the 2006 comedy miniseries Time Trumpet:

[Once] Tesco has fully saturated Britain, they will set their sights on Denmark. When the Danes refuse, the retailer will bring out the War of the Worlds-style Tesco walkers.

Insert your own Trojan Horse joke here.