Science Fiction: A Blueprint for Reality?

5 days ago6 min read

From space travel to smartphones, many of today’s groundbreaking inventions first appeared in fiction.

But beyond predicting new technologies, science fiction can tell us something much more important. It invites us to imagine not just what’s possible, but the kind of future we want to create.

Here’s my short explainer on the subject:

Predicting the future

I’m going to take an educated guess that your introduction to many of today’s technological marvels came from the films, TV shows and books you enjoyed as a kid.

That was certainly the case for me. Take Back to the Future Part II, where Doc’s arrivalinto the future begins with a quick check of the weather forecast on his smartwatch to confirm the rain is about to stop. It prefigured my reliance on the Apple Watch weather app by 26 years!¹ The Hill Valley of 2015 was also remarkably prescient with its depiction of VR headsets, Zoom-style video calls, and contactless payments becoming everyday staples of modern life.

The PADDs (Personal Access Display Devices) seen in Star Trek: The Next Generation introduced us to tablet computing 23 years before Apple launched the iPad. A talking, self-driving car called KITT was the real star of the David Hasselhoff series Knight Rider, pre-empting (and possibly even inspiring) modern-day breakthroughs from Tesla and Waymo. Gene-editing advancements like CRISPR were foreshadowed by Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park.²

And the cult novel Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters was just as prophetic. Its depiction of genetically engineered bacteria designed to digest plastic – a far-fetched fantasy back in 1972 – has recently emerged as a major contender in the fight to tackle plastic pollution in the ocean.

I could go on. For generations, science fiction writers have allowed us to take a peek at what tomorrow might hold.

They’ve also shaped our language. The word “Robot” wasn’t coined by an inventor but by Czech playwright Karel Čapek. His 1920 play Rossum’s Universal Robots envisioned synthetic labourers who (spoiler alert!) ultimately rebel and overthrow their human creators. William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer gave us “cyberspace”, and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash introduced us to the “Metaverse” three decades before Mark Zuckerberg’s infamously cringeworthy attempt.

Terms like these have influenced how we describe and think about new technologies long before they became reality.

Inspiring innovation

Science fiction doesn’t just predict the future – it can inspire it too.

Jules Verne’s novels ignited Edwin Hubble’s passion for the cosmos, and in turn revolutionised our understanding of the universe. H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds spurred Robert H. Goddard to invent the world’s first liquid-fuelled rocket, and set humankind on the path to space.

Fictional creations have often been used as design blueprints. It was no coincidence that the first mobile phone looked like something from Star Trek. Its creator, Martin Cooper, proudly admitted that the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X was based on Captain Kirk’s communicator. “That was not fantasy to us,” he admitted, “that was an objective.”

Just a couple of months ago, Tesla unveiled its prototype RoboTaxi. With its gullwing doors and stark interior, the design of the self-driving cab was a familiar sight to fans of the Will Smith blockbuster I, Robot. Like Tesla’s RoboVan and Optimus robot, the designs were lifted straight from the 2004 film.

As sci-fi author Eileen Gunn puts it: “Sometimes it’s the seemingly weird ideas that come true – thanks, in part, to science fiction’s capacity to spark an imaginative fire in readers who have the technical knowledge to help realise its visions.”

Cautionary tales

Not every vision of the future is meant to be a blueprint.

A popular joke about one of sci-fi’s earliest classics goes: “Knowledge is knowing that Frankenstein is not the monster. Wisdom is knowing that he is.” Mary Shelley does not offer a ringing endorsement for humankind’s potential to meddle with nature.

Likewise, Frank Herbert’s influential Dune novels provide a parable for the potential horror unleashed when one individual gains too much power.

As the “Torment Nexus” meme (above) captures, some Silicon Valley tycoons seem to have mistaken these cautionary tales for instruction manuals.

Novelist Charles Stross is worried about where this might lead. He writes:

“Billionaires who grew up reading science-fiction classics published 30 to 50 years ago are affecting our life today in almost too many ways to list: Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars. Jeff Bezos prefers 1970s plans for giant orbital habitats. Peter Thiel is funding research into artificial intelligence, life extension and ‘seasteading.’ Mark Zuckerberg has blown $10 billion trying to create the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. And Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has published a “techno-optimist manifesto” promoting a bizarre accelerationist philosophy that calls for an unregulated, solely capitalist future of pure technological chaos.”

To paraphrase the immortal line uttered by Jurassic Park’s Ian Malcolm: “They’re so preoccupied with whether or not they can, they haven’t stopped to think if they should.”

This misreading of dystopian fiction isn’t a new phenomenon.

In 1914, H.G. Wells’ The World Set Free imagined an atomic weapon capable of unprecedented destruction. Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd read the novel in 1932 and, shortly afterwards, patented the nuclear chain reaction described by Wells.³ Szilárd was later instrumental in setting up the Manhattan Project, which culminated in the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Wells later reissued his book with a bitter epitaph: “I told you so. You damned fools.”

Beyond gadgets

Astronomer Dr Helen Klus believes that science fiction “[...] is the first step towards progress as it allows us to imagine the future we want, and consider ways to work towards it. It also makes us aware of futures we wish to avoid, and helps us prevent them.”

This is ultimately why stories are so important – not just for the scientific breakthroughs and emerging technologies they predict or inspire, but for how they allow us to explore their potential impact on our lives. As the author Frederik Pohl puts it: “A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”

Star Trek is rightly praised for its uncannily accurate tech predictions. But that arguably isn’t where it has had the most significant impact.

The recruitment of NASA’s first female and black astronauts in the 1970s can be traced back to the original series a decade earlier. When Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura, criticised NASA for its lack of diversity, the agency invited her to help lead a recruitment campaign.⁴ This paved the way for Guion Bluford to become the first Black man in space and Sally Ride to become NASA’s first female astronaut.

Paying tribute to Nichols when she died in 2022, NASA’s Administrator Bill Nelson said: “Today, as we work to send the first woman and first person of colour to the Moon under Artemis, NASA is guided by the legacy of Nichelle Nichols.”⁵

The future needs fiction

As we stand on the brink of breakthroughs in AI, gene editing and space exploration, science fiction provides a crucial sandbox to envision new possibilities, reflect on ethical considerations and weigh up the consequences of new technologies and innovations.

Want to better understand the promise and perils of genetic engineering? Read Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. Curious about the ethics of AI? Dive into Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot.

After all, a few years from now, when we’re commuting across AI-powered cities in autonomous, flying taxis, we will need someone to think about the traffic. And, ultimately, where we want to go.