Given the large quantity of possibilities we have to tell stories, it is clear that it might be possible for people to ask themselves what would happen in the future, imagining that, maybe, we would already be colonizing Mars, bleeding out in another stupid world conflict or enjoying a great utopia that provides for everyone and does not allow anyone to suffer. However, for many of those stories, the passing of time has made it so that, what when they were written was the future, it became the present first and later the past.
This, dear readers, is what is known as "honorary alternative history", which does not count as actual alternate history because it was written at a time in which it seemed like the described events would happen, but in the end they never took place, for whatever reason.
There are many examples, and very famous. The best I can think about is, undoubtedly, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick's film made in collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, who also wrote a novel at the same time the film was being produced and would later work on several literary sequels to the novel (2010, 2061 y 3001) that extended the consequences of the events that took place in 2001. In this latter book, after the famous scene with the monolith with Also sprach Zarathustra as the background music while our ancestors fight and make their first tools, another monolith is discovered on the Moon that, when it is being investigated by astronauts, sends a signal to Jupiter. This is the reason why Dave Bowman, Frank Poole and another three astronauts are in the Discovery spaceship while they travel to Jupiter, next to the famous artificial intelligence HAL (according to Clarke, the fact that, by replacing each letter with the one immediately after, you can get IBM, was non-intentional). However, I am not going to say what really happens in the story (that's what the film and the novel are for, after all), but I will write about the effects of trying to write over what might happen in the nearby future.
Kubrick and Clarke imagined that, by the year 2001, we would already have colonies in the Moon, several great-sized space stations, common interplanetary space travel (well, these only work when going to Mars), functioning artificial intelligences... but in other situations we would be behind the times, such as the idea that we would still be using typewriters and computers would communicate by printing on paper. Also, according to both of them, Pan Am would be chartering trips to space stations, AT&T would provide telephone services and the Soviet Union would still be alive in the year 2001, but it does not look like there is a method to connect many computers in a joint network (for those missing the joke, the former and the latter do not exist anymore, while the second is in serious competition with others; of course, about space travel and Moon colonies, there's no word).
And that is another thing that has been clearly incredible: not just the fast expansion of Internet and its influence in people's normal life, but the fact that people did not even think that something similar would ever exist. One of the few that tried their hand at it was Mark Twain, who wrote in one of his works about a device called "telelectroscope", which used the phone network to allow people to exchange information (curiously, he also wrote about something that can be easily compared to social netowrks). None of the Great Three science fiction writers (Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert A. Heinlein) ever wrote about an interconnected computer network, although there are some similar things, such as Mike, the computer that controls all of the Moon's systems in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (Heinlein) or the Encyclopedia Galactica from the Foundation saga (Asimov).
Any work written before the fall of the Soviet Union also run into the risk of suffering this same problem. Tom Clancy, for example, tripped on this stone with some of his novels: Red Storm Rising (1986) has as its central argument the Third World War (another element that appears very commonly in fiction, but that, to this day, has yet to happen, fortunately), which starts with the Soviet Union invades West Germany in an attempt to distract NATO from a planned invasion of the Persian Gulf to take the oil the USSR cannot produce after an Islamic terrorist attack in a great Russian refinery; while The Sum of All Fears, published shortly before the Soviet Union's dissolution, shows the USSR as a supporter for the Middle East pacification plan put forward by the main character, and the patsy for a terrorist plan that intends to spark World War Three.
The idea of the Third World War is also very popular (so to speak) in the genre of future history, and many works dealing with it end up becoming obsolete due to the historical changes that have taken place since it was published. Apart from the already mentioned Red Storm Rising, we have Red Dawn (1984), which begins when the Soviets, with the aid of Nicaragua and Cuba, invade the United States of America; The Day After (1983), which shows how an attempt by the USSR to block West Berlin (again) leads to a nuclear war; The Third World War (1978), which ends with the fall of the Soviet Union after the nuclear destruction of Birmingham (United Kingdom) and Minsk (current Belarus), and Twilight 2000 (which should not be confused with the literary saga Twilight), a tabletop role-playing game where the war begins when NATO invades Poland, starting a nuclear war that ends up with the United States divided in different fragments and the destruction of the Soviet Union.
Another candidate to being flagged honorary alternative history is Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, which stated that, by the end of the 20th century, we would not only have robots, but that they would also be autonomous and self-conscious (still somewhat primitive when compared to what would appear later) thanks to the iridium-platinum positronic brain, which allowed for the robots' programation with the Three Laws of Robotics.
According to the Star Trek series, a scientist "discovered" in 1986 how to make transparent aluminium (actually, the Enterprise spaceship crew have exchanged this formula for the elements they need to build an enormous water tank that can allow them to carry to humpback whales to the 22nd century), and a series of wars called the Eugenics Wars took place between 1992 and 1996.
We could also speak about Jules Verne, one of whose less known novels was called Paris in the 20th Century. Here, the writer imagined how life would be in the French capital in the middle 20th century. It is a life where technological knowledge is preferred to cultural knowledge, having an artist or a person directly related to art as a relative is considered to be something shameful, there are no wars because the weapons designed by engineers and chemists are so advanced that no country dares start a war against others (well, that's one good thing, at least) and the main strength that impulses industry is compressed air. The main character, a young man that wishes to earn his living through writing, suffers because of the indifference of a society that does not understand nor accept his passion for literature.
Finally, Billy Wilder's film One, Two, Three, Splash!, in which the main character is a Coca Cola executive in West Berlin who hopes to expand his market to East Berlin, suffered this problem when the Berlin Wall was built... right while the movie was being filmed, pretty much screwing with the entire plot.
These are some of the many situations that can change since the moment a story is written about the future until one reaches (or not) that future. But I can tell you that I still have the hope to see humanity return to the Moon and step on Mars, something I am sure will happen relatively soon.
My apologies for taking my time to write this, but I was a bit ill and did not realize that it was time to publish this until some time ago.
See you!
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