Answering the actual question (Score 1)

The original question asking about how scfi-fi *influenced* contemporary life, not necessarily about what inventions were accurately predicted. With that in mind, I'm somewhat depressed to admit its the more popular fare like Star Trek that have had the biggest influence due to their popularity rather much in the way of writers actually predicting stuff. The communicator / mobile phone link was mentioned by the original poster. How about voice control for computers ? Come to that what about multimedia in general ? Computers that could understand and respond in spoken English were pretty far out there in the early 60s. Take a look at some of the literature the show has spawned, there are (quasi) serious works examing the physics of Star Trek. Touch screen technology first came to the mass public awareness via the bridge of the Enterprise. There is now a "contactless" taser gun on sale in France that acts and looks like a phaser. Douglas Adams' HHGTTG has inspired at least two web based projects I know of to emulate the great book itself, and if you access their pages via a GSM enabled PDA how far away are you from Adams' vision ? And what about dear old 007 ? All those gadget watches Q issued him seem to have inspired an entire generation of designers at Casio. Although Dick Tracy has to take credit for inspiring the watch / two-way radio (read mobile phone) trend. Finally, dear old Isaac Asmiov, in his early robot stories the company that built most of the positronic pals was called US Robotics a name we more readily associate with modems these days. Draxen