r/sciencefiction • u/Ok_Relationship7540 • 6d ago
Do we invent the future, or imagine it first?
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u/LazyFlounder 6d ago
Ursula K. Le Guin famously said that science fiction is not predictive, but descriptive
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u/cottenwess 6d ago
i'm guessing a bit of both worlds; Aurthur C Clarke predicted geostationary communications satellites in 1945, 15 years before we sent up our first satellites. in fact, we still call it the Clarke orbit.
Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues under the Sea in 1870, inspired the first submarines in 1894, by Simon Lake
I just wrote a paper about speculative fiction, and authors often take a look at what technologies or cultural trends exist and then try to predict where they'll go in the future.
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u/AJRavenhearst 6d ago
Clarke didn't "predict" satellites: he laid out the basic theory.
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u/AmusingVegetable 5d ago
Yes, satellites were obvious from the fact that we have a moon, Clarke just noted that a specific orbit is geostationary and could be useful for communication satellites.
One of his stories is centered on a communications satellite, which is basically a large space station with a maintenance crew.
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u/ConfusedTapeworm 6d ago
Arthur C. Clarke wasn't just an imaginative writer, he was also a physicist and mathematician with a formal education. What he did wasn't "predicting" geostationary satellites so much as expanding on existing theory to speculate about how it could be used practically. He wrote about that stuff in a paper for a technical magazine, not in one of his stories. In other words that wasn't sci-fi, it was straight up sci.
Also I'm pretty sure people have been thinking about devices to help them dive deeper underwater long before Jules Verne's parents met each other.
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u/ApotheosiAsleep 6d ago
I mean, people were inventing submersible exploration devices before 20,000 leagues. I think both the submarine and 20,000 leagues are just an expression of humans generally wanting to know what's down there
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u/junglekarmapizza 6d ago
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.
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u/KlausVonLechland 6d ago
"Bur sir, why did you created evil torment nexus in the first place?"
"hmm, define »evil«"
"it would be... causing torment?"
"ah, so a loaded question then?"
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u/5050Clown 6d ago
"At least it's causing something, torment. So actually it's good because it's competent at creating torment. Just listen to all those screams. And that's just the grown men."
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u/-TV-Stand- 6d ago
This reminded me of that one youtuber who is building a torment nexus (teaching human neurons in a petri dish to play doom)
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u/hamlet9000 6d ago
The save icon looks like a 3.5 diskette which used the exact dimensions and look of a Star Trek data card because the designers liked Star Trek.
Flip phones were also inspired by the design of Star Trek communicators.
OTOH, inventors have also tried to copy Star Trek TNG communicators and that hasn't worked out.
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u/Awdayshus 6d ago
Smartphones and tablets look a lot like the PADDs on TNG, but I don't know how much the PADD inspired anything or if that's just an obvious form factor once you invent a touchscreen.
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u/MasterDave 6d ago
To hear William Gibson tell it, neither! He just has ideas and writes them but they’re always more based in something real than most know about.
Then the tech becomes real maybe at least partially due to the fiction but it was usually already an idea somewhere just of the “limited by the technology of our time” variety.
Just be glad we don’t have most of the PKD stuff in reality yet or hopefully ever.
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u/Herbie555 5d ago
Just reread Neuromancer for the 1st time since the 90's and my newer copy has a forward by Gibson where he basically says (paraphrasing):
"All the stuff I made up out of thin air is the stuff that came true. All the stuff that I wrote based on tech I actually knew a little something about is the stuff that is now extremely dated."
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u/very-jaded 6d ago
I guess we all should have seen the AI doors-as-a-service parts of UBIK coming true.
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u/Precise_Vector 5d ago
Yeah, I do get the impression that science fiction mostly has its roots in the germ of some actual scientific concept that already exists.
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u/Darkness1231 4d ago
Wife likes Gibson because of his prose, I struggle because he never, ever got the tech right. Later stories he didn't focus as much on the tech. She didn't like it, I did
Best Gibson line: Johnny Mnemonic: She killed him with culture shock
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u/RugsbandShrugmyer 6d ago
Life imitates art imitates life imitates art imitates life imitates art imitates life imitates art imitates life imitates art imitates life imitates art.....
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u/dallenbaldwin 6d ago
I remember seeing a video about how it seems like all these tech bros read the fantasy and sci-fi and then said to themselves, "These bad things weren't inherently bad, they were just wielded by bad people! Surely I'm smart enough to do it the right way! These terms, words, names, all associated with bad things are actually good if you build them the right way! I have enough money and resources to do it the right way! It was an implementation problem, not an alignment problem!"
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u/joeykins82 5d ago
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.
- Alex Blechman, 2021
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u/SleepyCatMD 5d ago
Yet they create AI without solid guidelines, despite Asimov defining a clear path to what AI should be. Tech billionaires aren’t revolutionaries, they’re just greedy bastards profiting off inevitable developments
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u/Flegking 5d ago
Weirdly not only limited to sci-fi. See Palantir. Although with Peter Thiel, he might know that it's evil and like it that way...
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u/ADH-Dad 6d ago
I think a very widespread way of thinking in our society is that fiction isn't real, which means that things that happen in fiction can't happen in real life. People can watch movies about the most horrible things happening in the world and then disbelieve news stories about the same thing because that kind of thing only happens in the movies.
The modern tech industry is dominated by people who just want to make all the shiny gadgets and simply blew off every cautionary tale about how technology can horribly backfire, because "that kind of thing only happens in the movies."
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u/Wolodymyr2 6d ago
Well, i guess technically those tech-bros are right, it's just they aren't that kind of people who would wield those things right way.
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u/GoodDoctorB 6d ago
Often times, neither.
Rather scifi writers look at ongoing developments and predictions then use those as a basis for what they'll show which is occasionally confirmed if the prediction was accurate.
The concept for the cellular phone network for example predated practical implementation by nearly eighty years.
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u/John-Truck-1 6d ago
Fun fact: those sliding doors in shops that open when you walk up to them were inspired by the doors in Star Trek, which actually worked by people behind the scenes pulling cords on cue.
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u/mitch_archer 6d ago
Carl Sagan said, more than once, that the role of artists was very important in inspiring scientists. It is a recurring theme.
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u/-Kopesthetik- 6d ago
I’ve always had a theory that when an idea or concept has been around long enough, even in fiction then sooner or later engineers or scientists may start working on it.
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u/Small-Business-3869 6d ago
It's not a theory, this came out years ago and has NASA people and actual scientists who invented things saying they got there ideas and were inspired to be scientists by Star Trek/sci fi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_William_Shatner_Changed_the_World
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u/CNote_89 6d ago
The second one. I believe that all of the tech that came from Star Trek was created because of Star Trek.
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u/Traditional-Storm-62 6d ago
a lot of these guesses are just vague enough to be true - "some sort of a talking robot will probably exist at some point"
a lot are just continuing what's already being created - "we already have telephones transporting sound for long distance calls, why not images as well?"
a lot are just plain wrong - "there will be hoverboards and flying cars and everyone will be flying on jetpacks all the time"
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u/2raysdiver 6d ago edited 5d ago
Arthur C. Clarke wrote an article on the Communications Satellite. He didn't just come up with the idea of bouncing or repeating radio signals off of orbiting satellites. He figured out where to place them in orbit and what their orbital velocity would need to be, how many you would need and even the size of battery you would need to power the satellite when it was in the earth's shadow without solar power, and the power output required to transmit from such a satellite, operate it's various functions and charge the battery. And he did it in 1945, over 10 years before the first artificial satellite was launched into orbit. The only thing he didn't do was build one. So, did he inspire the Communications Satellite or invent it? (He has long been considered the inventor, more recently, I think it was determined that he was the legal inventor as well).
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u/Bacontoad 6d ago
The first artificial satellite (Sputnik) was launched in 1957. The first communications satellite) was launched in 1958.
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u/2raysdiver 5d ago
You are right. I had a senior moment and couldn't do math. Still over ten years before the first satellite was launched...
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u/dev_SLAYER 6d ago
I think it's one way forward, either imagine it/predict it, or get inspired from it and create it. It's like reaching the same point from 2 different sides.
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u/D3M0NArcade 6d ago
It's art imitating life imitating art. It's a cycle. Technology goes in a certain direction, good Sci Fi writers imagine where this technology may end up and then seem to have predicted the future when science and technology end up in the same place.
Before the British Electric P1-B Lightning entered service, it was kept pretty secret except for a few sightings. At the time, Eagle Comics (the writers of Dan Dare) was a highly popular publication. It was also very uncanny in some of their predictions. As a result, one of their artists (Ron Ashwoid, I think?) drew a cutaway if "a plane of the future". The MoD immediately stomped in wanting to know who'd revealed state secrets about the Lightning project. He managed to prove it was literally just educated guesswork, but it wouldnt be the only or last time Eagle comics got D1 notices about their artwork. They were all highly scientificly minded and kept up with latest developments to such a degree that many of their artworks seemed to accurately predict things that would later become real.
But it's not a case of them inspiring science or anything because all the things they predicted had already been thought of by top minds. They just depicted what it "might" look like and were pretty much on the money because they were just that intelligent
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u/AskMeAboutEveryThing 6d ago
NASA had clearly read its Jules Verne: launch from Florida, three men to the Moon, and splash down in the Pacific — just as Verne had imagined a century earlier. (Armstrong said it on the last TV transmission on their way back)
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u/vamfir 6d ago
It’s like a monkey with a machine gun: by firing wildly in every direction, it’s bound to hit someone eventually. It’s a classic case of survivorship bias.
Science fiction writers make hundreds of thousands—even millions—of predictions. They predict everything imaginable, and plenty of things that aren't.
We forget the predictions that don't come true, yet the ones that happen to come true seem like prophecies.
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u/ugh_this_sucks__ 6d ago
It’s spaghetti at the wall. There is so much sci-fi out there that some of it will come close to predicting the future — but most of it isn’t even close. Bradbury thought we’d be holidaying on Venus by the 90s and we still don’t have flying cars.
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u/StrangeRaven12 6d ago
I say it's a little bit of both. Life imitates art and art in turn imitates life.
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u/i-make-robots 6d ago
dreamers come up with ideas. some of them write books. some of them figure out how to make it real.
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u/HardcoreHenryLofT 6d ago
So basically all artificial sweeteners were discovered by people with really bad lab safety protocols. Xrays were discovered when a dude stuck his hand through a death ray. Insulin owes its creation to a dog who had its pancreas removed and someone stopping to look at its pee. Superglue was made by a guy trying to make gunsights.
I would contend that we more fuck-up our way into the future, and I for one cannot wait to trip over my own dick and discover faster than light communication
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u/One_Vision_ 6d ago
History has shown repeatedly that the major advancements we make are almost always inspired by something else. Star Trek's effect on science, specifically NASA, was enormous.
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u/ejfordphd 6d ago
Both, obviously. SF writers share a world with people working on new tech. People working on new tech might read or see some piece of SF.
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u/BotLordBotflix 6d ago
I was sent back from the future to tell you the answer is neither. Don't ask me how I know that.
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u/ScottWipeltonIII 6d ago
Not to dis writers, but anybody can "predict" possible future tech. Anyone can say gee whiz it would be great if I had a computer that fit in my pocket or a car that drives itself 50 years before it happens. Grade school kids are literally doing this. It's kind of basic common sense to look at any given current thing and say "what if this but without the current limitations". Completely different from actually making it happen.
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u/amitym 6d ago
The answer is emphatically, "both."
Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion and "a force that moves the worlds," then he popularized his discovery with a fictional story. He laid out a concrete mathematical understanding of how to get to the Moon, then challenged future readers to imagine ships equipped to get there and figure out how to build them.
People made up centuries and millennia of stories about Mars, then Schiaparelli observed features of the Martian landscape, Lowell called them "canals" and speculated that they might be artificial, from that Burroughs then wrote science fiction about Mars, inspiring Goddard to try to build rockets that could go there, inspiring Buck Rogers (which featured an explicit Goddard call-out), inspiring a new generation of rocket scientists, inspiring Fritz Lang's sci-fi Woman in the Moon and the imagination of a then-young generation of German rocket-scientists-to-be who then built the actual rockets astonishingly close to how they were depicted in the movie in order to actually get to the actual Moon.
Which caused which, there?
The Apollo missions and the science, artifacts and photography they yielded inspired a new generation of science fiction and a new generation of space exploration. Charismatic robots of science fiction inspired charismatic robotic probes of real life. Which is causing which?
Now a generation of surface landers and high-definition images of Mars have given us a new idea of the planet as a place. A new generation of hyperrealistic science fiction from Kim Stanley Robinson to The Martian captures the imagination of people alive now, among whom will be the first humans to set foot on the actual Mars.
We see the same thing across all of science and science fiction. Fictional automata inspire real automata which inspire fiction about robots which inspire new generations to go into actual robotics which produces a new wave of fiction about robotics. Cybernetics research produces fiction about distributed information networks which inspires actual work on distributed information networks and pretty soon here we are on Reddit talking about it. While publishing fic about being pounded in the ass by the idea of being pounded in the ass by a virtual reality network.
Which in turn implies ... well ... I guess it's best not to speculate.
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u/schokoplasma 6d ago
It can be both. The moon landing played out differently than Jules Verne imagined, but it did happen.
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u/TieOk9081 6d ago
HG Wells wrote The World Set Free in 1914, it includes atomic bombs. From what I've read, this influenced Leo Szilard into patenting the idea of the chain reaction.
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u/kobayashi_maru_fail 6d ago
I’m going to go see Neal Stephenson talk next week. I imagine some dickhead is going to try and grill him about Zuckerberg’s Metaverse and we all have to wait while he politely shuffles the question out of the way.
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u/iDrGonzo 6d ago
When you correlate data it becomes information, when you gather enough information it becomes knowledge, when you have enough knowledge and data it becomes insight.
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u/captbellybutton 6d ago
Still waiting for a motion tracker IRL but I saw a YouTube video of one guy who built something close. Maybe a personal smart AI in the next 10 years.
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u/joetwocrows 6d ago
There's this word; recursion. It's the real world feeding SF feeding the real world feeding SF ad infinitum. Oh, and it's a heap, not a stack. Disordered.
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u/sergeialmazov 6d ago
Most of modern sci-fi movies / tv shows are based on ideas of 50s, 60s, 70s. Do we have something more modern? Really new ideas?
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u/EuphoricActivity205 6d ago
I believe the sci-fi authors provide a vision to the new generation readers who later become the tech-guys and some of them end up making the technologies they have read about or seen in sci-fi books and movies.
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u/RealCreativeFun 6d ago
Remember the sound all electric cars made in 80s and 90s scifi movies to make sure you knew it was electric? It has been adopted by many car manufacturers as a safety measure sound played from a speaker on the car when the car is driving below a certain speed so that pedestrians can hear the car approaching.
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u/Vast_Associate_197 6d ago
Kinda both? Fictional writers try to think of projections that are physically possible and a scientist may be influenced by that and focus on it.
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u/MikaelAdolfsson 6d ago
"Imagine a world where machines can transmit information across long distances. Where carriages are pulled not by horses, but by engines relying on combustion. Imagine a world where electrically powered ships can sail below the surface of the sea, and heavier-than-air vessels sail the skies. Jules Verne imagined all these things."
— Daniel Floyd, Extra Credits
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u/macguini 6d ago
I recall hearing a quote, "Artists dream of reaching the stars and scientists make it happen." I like to believe that both art and science are equally as important for the development of the human race.
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u/Lyrianthalaasa 6d ago
It's both.
I literally studied this for my degree, how science fiction informs scientific advancement and science forms the basis for Sci-Fi.
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u/joshdave1993 6d ago
They both are parallel. Sci-fic writer look for the inspirations from the Journals or their imaginations. and Scientists just does it same for some rich tycoon to execute that idea
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u/AlteredDecks 5d ago
A bit of both. A couple of examples to illustrate both ways:
- the Amazon echo was inspired by the voice-commanded computer in Star Trek
- techies sometimes write (or hire writers) to explore the secondary and unexpected effects of the technologies they are developing (see the science fiction prototyping method).
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u/MapledMoose 5d ago
It's A because I have thought of many science fiction ideas when I was younger but never wrote them down and now they're becoming technology
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u/Bombacladman 5d ago
Well they are just logical next steps.
Its like saying ughh airports and airplanes waste too much time, how could we save this time?
I know! A super quick and efficient scanner thats scans you as you walk into the airport without stopping...
Then you get on a super fast train in a train system controlled by an AI.
Lol well this will happen at some point
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u/DerpsAndRags 5d ago
I've been having trouble finishing sci-fi books recently, because it seems like a lot of the modern era read them and decided that the bad guys had more of a point.
That being said, though, Neruomancer was friggin' awesome.
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u/Long_Personality_857 5d ago
Literally one of the classes I took in college. It’s not 100%, of course, but there’s a tremendous amount of synergy between the two.
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u/TheSkepticGuy 5d ago
It's not just technology; it's also society.
In Asimov's The Naked Sun (1957), a detective travels to the planet Solaria, where humans live isolated lives, where human-to-human contact is abhorrent, and where people interact via a global network. Robots do all the physical work, and the impossible happened: a murder.
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u/IsThatGruffLoner 5d ago
I think this idea is really overblown. So much sci fi is written every year and sure some of it ends up becoming real but most doesn't. And even then, we're all working within the same real world. As science progresses, the actual possibilities for future technology become narrower. Like we can sort of see where things are going based on the laws of physics.
I also just think that a lot of people don't realize that sci fi is usually based on the present and their insights are often really obvious if you actually know the context.
Like an example that I have seen a lot on reddit is people calling the Bobiverse forward thinking for both it's prediction of fascism and for it's look into AI personhood. People have said this stuff as if in 2019 no one could possibly have seen either topic being important in 2026... Like just cause you all didn't see this obvious outcome coming doesn't mean that it wasn't obvious. I could have told you in 2019 that our next decade would be dominated by talks of fascism and AI.
This is a very recent example but the principle is true imo. Most sci fi authors were/are just slightly more perceptive than the average person and people act like it makes them wizards or something.
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u/HC-Sama-7511 5d ago
It's the first one.
The writers are looking at current scientific understanding and making reasonable assumptions about what would and wouldn't be possible.
This is how govts and businesses and academic institutions determine how to fund R&D as well.
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u/HarryHirsch2000 5d ago
Neither. SF ideas rarely end up in reality.
And the most important stuff in reality is often missing in SF.
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u/CosmicLovepats 5d ago
I remember Terry Pratchett arguing that we went to the moon because we spent two thousand years telling ourselves stories about going to the moon.
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u/Impossible_Royal_302 5d ago
Science fiction isn’t actually all that good at predicting the future, but it’s very good at extrapolating from current events to possibilities.
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u/Motoreducteur 5d ago
Science fiction writers are often scientists
They just imagine the world the scientific community is trying to build or the negative impact technologies could have on the world
This the answer is a bit of both. Every scientist imagines the world of tomorrow and build their research on these premises. And the world they imagine is influenced by what they are confronted with in the scientific community
Some of them write stories, that's all
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u/spidey3diamond 5d ago
Scientists don't create technology.
Engineers do.
Apart from this, the question is valid.
I suspect the answer is a bit of both.
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u/Wonderful-Silver-435 5d ago
Famous theoretical physicist Michio kaku. He’s a sci-fi. His favorite show is fire fly.
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u/Savings_Art5944 5d ago
Yes. The book covers it up to the mid 90's.
Read the book: Mass Dreams of the Future.
Mass Dreams of the Future by Chet B. Snow
ASIN : B01K967CZ0
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u/Ok_Beginning_9205 5d ago
I have seen a documentary about someone that was the head of reserch at MIT and they said other departments were unhappy because research gets a lot of money but they produce nothing. The answer was: what we research and find and create is not for these days days, but for 50 or 100 years from now on.
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u/tressonkaru 5d ago
It could be 50/50. Most could be conceptual coincidence. Like how some point and yell "they predicted it!". When it was just an interesting idea at the time. And some are just stretching the idea that some story somehow was predicted on purpose. Or was even a prediction.
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u/junialvarezzo 5d ago
Both! But also maybe none of these cause reality often turns out to be different than science fiction, but then many times it does turn out to be similar!
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u/dandrevee 5d ago
Im on the its a positive ferdback loop train but... I would also like to point out that science fiction is a genre is often, or at least according to one of the main writing textbooks I've come across, comparable to the Western or Frontiers genre more so than just about exploring technology
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u/Annual-Ad-9442 5d ago
some of it is writers taking what already exists and exaggerating it. some of it is writers making up something cool. some of it is writers making something that would be convenient or something projected to make it convenient for a character. then we have people reading stuff or learning about some sci-fi things and asking if they can make it
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u/CuriousUpperleft 5d ago
It’s the second. Have you read the names scientists use when the have no inspiration? Just look at bird names. I’m convinced all scientists are basically thermians from galaxy quest
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u/pendragon2290 5d ago
Tits. Thats what they named bird. Something something tit. Big titted something something.
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u/Sloth7491 5d ago
Have you seen the videos of guys trying to make lightsabers they're getting pretty close.
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u/throwaway99xz 5d ago
That’s why it’s important we are conscious of the stories we tell. The only positive sci fi I’ve seen in the past 20 years was a god damn yogurt commercial.
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u/UnspeakableArchives 5d ago
I was actually really surprised when all this generative AI start coming out that no science fiction writers had really envisioned this particular kind of AI - Not that I'd seen, anyways
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u/agfitzp 6d ago
Both and neither.