Science Fiction Imagines, so Inventors Can Invent

James Gunn is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Kansas, and the author or editor of 42 books.

Updated May 9, 2012, 1:57 PM

Science fiction gets a lot of attention these days; news stories begin “straight out of science fiction.” As Isaac Asimov commented 40 years ago, we live in a science-fiction world. Should we read science fiction to anticipate the world we’re going to be living in? Well, yes — and no.

Science fiction writers are wrong more often than they’re right — maybe 9 to 1 — but in the anticipation business, that’s a pretty good ratio.

Science fiction writers aren’t in the prediction business; they’re in the speculation business, using “hasn’t happened” or “hasn’t happened yet” to create entertaining scenarios that may or may not anticipate future realities. They’re wrong more often than they’re right — maybe 9 to 1 — but in the anticipation business, that’s a pretty good ratio. They missed on personal jetpacks and flying cars (though these were most often found in Popular Mechanics), but they hit big on rocket ships and atomic bombs. As John W. Campbell, an editor in the genre’s “golden age,” once wrote, science fiction exists in the gap between the laboratory and the marketplace. Sometimes there’s no market.

Some examples of on-target speculations: Jules Verne’s submarine. He didn’t invent the submarine — Robert Fulton did that in the 18th century — but he imagined a really effective one. Did he anticipate Simon Lake, the inventor of the ocean-going submarine? Lake attributed his inspiration to “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” just as Igor Sikorsky attributed his invention of the helicopter to Verne’s “Robur the Conqueror.” One rule of invention: before you can invent it, you have to imagine it.

Asimov, whose robot stories inspired a generation of robotic scientists, anticipated the developing robot industry, and commented about the first moon landing that “science-fiction writers and readers didn’t put a man on the moon all by themselves, but they created a climate of opinion in which the goal of putting a man on the moon became acceptable.”

A couple of examples from my own novels: “The Listeners” (1972) is credited by two SETI leaders for inspiring their work, and “The Immortals” (1962) anticipated the health care crisis. We didn’t get Hilton in the sky or a colony on the moon, as Arthur Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” described, but this was from a lack of will.

We didn’t exactly get Big Brother and universal surveillance, as George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” anticipated. This dystopia was a warning that helped prevent its worst aspects from coming true — and we did get the “memory hole” and “newspeak.”