This entry deals with sf as a "predictive" genre. For sf stories about foretelling future events, seePrecognition.

The most widespread false belief about sf among the general public is that it is a literature of prediction. Very few sf writers have ever claimed this to be the case, although HugoGernsback did see one function of his sf magazines as to paint an accurate picture of the future. Very few of the stories he published lived up to his editorializing. When John WCampbell Jr took over the editorship ofAstounding he demanded an increasing scientific plausibility from his writers, but a plausible-sounding "perhaps" is a long way from prediction.

None of this has prevented sf fans from crowing with delight when an sf writer has made a good guess, and the mythology of sf is full of such examples. H GWells predicted the use of the tank in "The Land Ironclads" (December 1903Strand), of aerial bombing inThe War in the Air (1908) and of the atom bomb (more or less) inThe World Set Free (1914). Ever since Einstein's mass-energy equations had been published, it had been generally known that enormous power was locked up in the atom, and stories aboutNuclear Energy and atomicWeapons were commonplace in the 1920s and 1930s; more surprising is the prevision of atomic destruction in RobertCromie'sThe Crack of Doom (1895), whoseMad Scientist declares that "one grain of matter contains sufficient energy [...] to raise a hundred thousand tons nearly two miles" and proposes to destroy the Earth thus. Atomic-energy stories became much more accurate in the early 1940s, and Robert AHeinlein, Lesterdel Rey and CleveCartmill all wrote predictive stories before Hiroshima: "Blowups Happen" (September 1940Astounding) and "Solution Unsatisfactory" (May 1941Astounding) by Heinlein writing as Anson MacDonald,Nerves (September 1942Astounding; exp1956; rev1976) by del Rey and "Deadline" (March 1944Astounding) by Cartmill. Heinlein also predicted popular adoption of the water bed (originally a nineteenth-century medical invention) inBeyond This Horizon (April-May 1942Astounding as by Anson MacDonald;1948),Double Star (February-April 1956Astounding;1956), andStranger in a Strange Land (1961); his "Waldo" (August 1942Astounding) both anticipated and gave a name to remote-controlWaldos; hisYoung Adult novelSpace Cadet (1948) casually posits universal ownership of (and accessibility via) pocket-sized mobile phones. (See alsoVideophone, a device endemic in sf since the late nineteenth century.)

Most early prediction stories were aboutFuture War, futureWeapons and the various possibilities ofInvasion. Not many of them were correct; although several stories predicted war between the UK and Germany before 1914 (and, indeed, between the UK and almost everyone else), most of them centred on an invasion across the Channel which never took place. Edward EverettHale wrote rather charmingly about an artificial satellite in "The Brick Moon" (October-December 1869Atlantic Monthly). Arthur CClarke published a celebrated article about communications satellites, "Extraterrestrial Relays" (October 1945Wireless World), but this was not a story; nor, sadly, did it lead to a patent. JulesVerne is thought by many to have invented the submarine inVingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870; trans asTwenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea1873), but in fact functional submarines had existed since at least the eighteenth century. One of Verne's best pieces of prediction was quite accidental; the moon-shot inDe la terre à la lune (1865), which was published with the sequelAutour de la lune (1870) inFrom the Earth to the Moon (trans1873), is fired from a spot very close to Cape Canaveral in Florida. RudyardKipling predicted transatlantic aerial trade, specifically airmail post, inWith the Night Mail (November 1905McClure's; rev1909 chap). ErasmusDarwin's long poemThe Temple of Nature (1802) preceded Verne, Wells and just about everybody else in its joyful description of airborne fleets of transport ships,War in the air, submarines and greatCities with skyscrapers. EdwinBalmer had an early form ofLie Detector inThe Achievements of Luther Trant (coll1910) with WilliamMacHarg. Hugo Gernsback had many technological predictions inRalph 124C 41+ (April 1911-March 1912Modern Electrics; fixup1925); this is one of the eighteen stories of the period quoted by EverettBleiler inScience-Fiction: The Early Years (1990) as anticipating television. NevilShute predicted metal fatigue as a danger to aircraft in hisTechnothrillerNo Highway (1948), written shortly before several planes crashed for exactly that reason.

It is a moderately impressive list, and could be made more so by multiplication of examples, but it proves very little. For every correct prediction a dozen were wrong, or correct only if facts are stretched a little; for example,Pulp-magazine sf of the 1930s made much ofDeath Rays; it is rather a dubious vindication to point out that laser beams can now be used as weaponry. The entryFutures Studies (which includes several examples of real prediction) discusses the usual strategy of sf writers when dealing with the future; their imaginative scenarios are as often as not meant as awful warnings, and the emphasis is almost invariably on whatcould happen, not whatwill happen. It would hardly be fair to attack sf writers as false prophets when they seldom think of themselves as being in the prophecy business at all. In many ways their errors are more interesting than their successes, for they add to our knowledge of social history. Our expectations of the future change just as quickly as history itself changes; theAutomation to which Gernsback and others looked forward in the teens of the century had already become a potential nightmare by the time of KurtVonnegut Jr'sPlayer Piano (1952; vtUtopia 14). Where sf is correct, of course, the explanation is not magic, just good research. Verne took much advice from his engineer friends and Shute spent many years as an aeronautical engineer – and, of course, many sf writers subscribe to scientific journals....

One area where sf can claim some credit isSpace Flight; this was the central dream of sf, even during the years when respectable scientists regularly argued for its impossibility (seeRockets). But even here, though sf was right enough in the broad sense, it managed to get both the sociological and the technological details appallingly wrong. Most of Heinlein's early Moon rockets were built by capitalist enterprise, and not by the resources of the US Government; the Russian government, naturally, was not mentioned at all, even though it was in Russia that the first solidly grounded theorizing about space travel had taken place, in the work of KonstantinTsiolkovsky, who wrote somewhat didactic but staggeringly accurate prophetic stories on the subject, beginning in the nineteenth century. The eponymous vessel in Heinlein'sRocket Ship Galileo (1947) is, absurdly, constructed largely by teenage boys in the backyard. Only WilliamTenn ran counter to the free-enterprise spirit of most US sf by imagining in "Alexander the Bait" (May 1946Astounding) that the space programme would be run by giant government institutions, not individuals or even corporations. Many sf stories about the firstMoon landing omit the single most dramatic detail, that the entire proceedings would be watched on Earth on television. However, exceptions which did in fact predict a televised Moon landing include Homer EonFlint's "The Planeteer" (9 March 1918All-StoryWeekly), Arthur CClarke'sPrelude to Space (1951; vtMaster of Space1961; vtThe Space Dreamers1969) and Raymond FJones's "The Moon is Death" (March 1953Future).

Computers are another area where early sf's predictive abilities were ridiculously askew; so preoccupied were sf writers with the dramatic possibilities of theRobot that they hardly noticed that back in the real world mechanical men were of little interest to anyone while the computer – driven by the invention of the transistor, likewise missed by sf – was rapidly transforming the face of the future. Sf writers caught up, of course, but only after computers were becoming commonplace. However, there were one or two remarkably prescient stories that foreshadowed theInternet (which see), and FrederikPohl scored several hits with his early extrapolation of the computer-linked mobile phone inThe Age of the Pussyfoot (October 1965-February 1966Galaxy;1969), as described in a briefing forSleeper-Awakes returnees:

From the same decade, VernorVinge's "The Accomplice" (April 1967If) deals with the theft of mainframeComputer time to generate an impressively faithful CGI film of J R RTolkien'sThe Lord of the Rings (1954-1955 3vols).

Nearly all the examples cited above are cases of predictions in the sphere ofTechnology; more interesting perhaps, and generally with a slightly higher success rate, were the predictions made about futurePolitics andSociology. Fortunately mostDystopias have not come into being in the real world, but certain aspects of them certainly have. One of the most interesting cases of prediction in theSoft Sciences was Robert LouisStevenson'sStrange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), whose melodramatic suppositions were, even as he wrote, being conceptually paralleled by the work of Sigmund Freud (1865-1939), who also came to believe that the human mind had a primitive component, the id, not wholly masked by the more reputable ego.

Occasionally the images thrown up by sf enter the public mind by an apparent process of osmosis, so that they become known even to those who do not read sf, and thereby create a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Some examples are given inFutures Studies, which discusses this question. Perhaps the most notable is again the case ofSpace Flight, where it is certainly arguable that the US Government could never have got away with budgeting such large amounts of the national income on the space programme had thedesire for space exploration, largely catalysed by sf, not been so great.

Most sf prediction is set in theNear Future, and further examples are given in that entry. In the nature of things, a great many thematic entries in this encyclopedia necessarily deal in part with prediction. Apart from those already mentioned, entries where predictions in the social sciences predominate includeCities;Disaster,Ecology,Economics,Games and Sports,Leisure,Media Landscape andOverpopulation; more technical areas where sf has made checkable predictions areCommunications,Cybernetics,Ecology,Machines,Medicine,Moon,Pollution,Power Sources,Transportation andUnder the Sea; areas where sf predictions have not yet had the opportunity for a full testing include areClones (confirmed by animal though not human experiments),Cryonics (many are frozen, none yet awoken),Cyborgs (an increasing commonplace of medical technology),Genetic Engineering (likewise),Nanotechnology,Space Habitats (looking less and less likely, alas),Spaceships,Suspended Animation,Terraforming and the extended possibilities ofUpload. Many readers suppose that theCyberpunk predictions of human experience ofVirtual Realities achieved by plugging the brain into machines are truly predictive. A technical problem is that the neurons in the brain transmit information much more slowly than microprocessors do, which might make the brain/computer interface rather tricky – but time will tell.

An sf scholar who has written interestingly about prediction is ChrisMorgan, whose relevant books (their remit extends well beyond sf to include popular science, journalism and so on) areThe Shape of Futures Past: The Story of Prediction (1980) and, with DavidLangford,Facts and Fallacies: A Book of Definitive Mistakes and Misguided Predictions (1981; exp2017 ebook), the latter being especially funny and eye-opening. [PN/DRL]

see also:Futurology.

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