Should We Look At Science Fiction As Fact?

I’m always interested in the predictive qualities of fiction. Here’s a non-science fiction example. In 1898 Morgan Robertson wrote a book called Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan which essentially tells the story of the sinking of the Titanic. This wouldn’t be impressive except for the fact that the book was published fourteen years before Titanic sank. Pretty creepy, right? I love hearing about things like that. That’s probably why I love science fiction so much. It’s concerned with the future already so the likelihood of a predication coming true is higher than in regular fiction. This video points out some of the things that science fiction writers have successfully predicted!

This sort of things blows my mind. I already knew about some of this stuff, but some of it was new information to me! H.G. Wells in particular seems to have been pretty good at this sort of thing. It’d be interesting to go through his works and see just how many accurate predictions he made. Maybe I’ll put that on a to-do list and get back to it when I have more time on my hands. Of course, many of these things may become true purely because the stories have put the ideas in people’s heads. Whatever the case may be I hope we see time machines in our future!

While listening to a podcast conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson he brought up something I never thought about in regards to this sort of thing. Namely, the danger. Specifically he was talking about fiction that has human beings leaving Earth to colonize other planets. He feels that while this is good for story-telling it can be detrimental to our lives in other ways. If we believe that Earth can be so easily replaced maybe we won’t take care of it in the way that it deserves. This had never occurred to me. If we believe in the predictive capabilities of fiction what happens when we have faith that a certain technology will become available… and it doesn’t?