Prescience, Prediction, Extrapolation and Inspiration

A recently released academic paper (one of mine!) presented the community with a suggestion: given how good science fiction is at predicting the future, why shouldn’t we use it to predict where to look for exoplanets bearing life? An analysis of the pulp magazines available online found that constellations including Andromeda, Draco and Cygnus are most often predicted as regions of activity, while Lacerta, Equuleus and Scutum might be of most interest under the Dark Forest hypothesis.

This was, of course, a contribution to the long tradition of April Fools papers in astronomy - serious studies of very silly subjects, published on 1st April. However it asks a serious question: is science fiction ever actually prescient?

Prescience (i.e. knowledge of events before they occur) is a term often applied to SF writing.

The genre is known to have made early predictions of solar sails (e.g. De la terre a la lune, Jules Verne, 1865), exploitation of solar power (e.g. Ralph 124C 41+, Hugo Gernsback, 1911; The Power Planet, Murray Leinster, 1931), in vitro fertilisation and genetic engineering (e.g. Daedalus, J B S Haldane, 1924; Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, 1932), domestic robots (e.g. R.U.R., Karel Capek, 1921; There Will Come Soft Rains, Ray Bradbury, 1950), reality television (e.g. The Year of the Sex Olympics, Nigel Kneale, 1968) and global telecommunications (e.g. The Machine Stops, E M Forster, 1909) amongst many other examples. The magazine Astounding Science Fiction, its editor and authors were famously investigated by US wartime intelligence services when some of its stories (e.g. Solution Unsatisfactory, Robert Heinlein, 1941; Deadline, Cleve Cartmill, 1944) proved uncomfortably close to the contemporary Manhattan Project in terms of their technology. 

As a result, list articles with titles like “6 Eerily Specific Inventions Predicted in Science Fiction” or “Science Fiction Books that Predicted the Future with Terrifying Accuracy” are common on websites and in newspapers. Many of these are phrased with words, like “eerie” or “terrifying”, which impart an impression of a foreknowledge that lies outside of the realm of normal experience. The word prescient or prescience is one of my least favourite of these descriptive words. By assigning knowledge of events yet to happen to the writers of SF, it leans into the idea that these forecasts lie beyond the scope of causality, and instead appeals to the realm of sixth-sense mental abilities and mysterious forces.

In this context ‘prediction’ is being used in the same way that one might say a psychic can ‘predict’ some catastrophe or unlikely event: a foresight of events that amounts to knowledge of a future time. However prediction can be used in other ways. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of the word gives:

 While for predict it states:

There is an interesting ambiguity here. The end of both definitions certainly seems to accord with the idea that prediction lies in the realm of the supernatural (the OED defines ‘prophecy’ as “to speak or write by, or as by, divine inspiration, or in the name of God or a god”). However another key element of the verb “to predict” is “on the basis of knowledge or reasoning”.

While this may seem like pedantry, there is a key difference here, and one I think is important. The use of the word ‘prediction’ with its ambiguity between extrapolation based on reason and supernatural inspiration is unhelpful in this context.

Science fiction is not prescient. It is extrapolative.

The remit of science fiction, first and foremost, is to entertain. To do so it will often blur, or even knowingly ignore, facts. However what distinguishes SF from other forms of fiction is that it should do so in the context of logical and reasoned extrapolation from the current limits of knowledge to the possibilities that lie beyond. In many cases, this involves a forward extrapolation through time, or to future technologies. In some cases, it may involve a “what if?” extrapolation, involving either a change in the sequence of events, or a change in the nature of the world (for instance, in the laws of motion or relativity). In extreme cases, this causes the genre to overlap with fantasy - particularly in the case of Clarke’s Third Law: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

However the key point here is that where the predictions of science fiction have come true, it was not because of some remarkable prescience or divine inspiration, but rather because the development of devices or their applications was predictable in the rational extrapolation sense from earlier trends and evidence. In the peak era of the pulp magazines in the 1930s-60s, this included extrapolation of then-theorised or experimental rocket and nuclear technologies, whereas throughout its history, science fiction extrapolated from the constant growth of communications technology and the advent of wireless communications to produce apparent predictions of smart phones and today's interconnected online world. While these lay beyond the technology accessible to the authors, they were based on sound physical principles known at the time, and could be envisaged as a logical extension of then-extant trends. 

Writing in a column entitled “Science” for the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in October 2024, scientist-author Isaac Asimov discussed this very point, laying out what he chose to call his Three Laws of Futurics:

In other words he was saying that trends now ongoing are likely to continue, and humans to act in much the same way as always. That results that appears obvious to those who carefully consider those trends can surprise and entertain those who don’t. And that the impact of those results on the people affected by them can lead to interesting and unexpected narratives. One of his examples was the development of atomic weaponry - it was the culmination of a research trend that began in at least the 1880s, was discussed speculatively in SF long before it became better known (as evidenced by the ‘Deadline’ affair) and resulted not just in nuclear war but also nuclear stalemate, atomic power and other societal consequences which SF explored.

As Asimov noted:

So was such an extrapolation possible in the case of potential alien origins? Yes and No.

The more careful of the pulp SF writers (who included professional physicists and astronomers) would have been aware of the relative impact of massive stars versus sun-like stars on habitability of their environs. It is unsurprising that a large number of stories can be found clustered around nearby, sun-like stars which have long been known to astronomers. Writers and readers would also have been aware of the limitations of using the constellations as indications of alien origins. The constellations each cover a vast area of the sky from the perspective of modern telescopes, and their naked-eye visible members are not meaningful arrangements of stars in three dimensions, with apparent neighbours often very different in distance from Earth.

As a result, the more careful writers of fiction, dating back to the dawn of modern astronomy, would be likely to identify individual stars rather than constellations as the potentially habitable origins of life forms and to have some insight into which stars those might be. Indeed, many of the appearances of constellation names in science fiction were associated with specific stars:

Ceti (the genitive form of the constellation Cetus, the whale) is common mostly because the star Tau Ceti is the closest, stable sun-like single star, just 12 light years from Earth, and is thus often treated as a prime candidate for both hosting habitable planets and for human colonisation.

Similarly the 61 Cygni binary system accounts for more than half of references to Cygnus, the Swan. This system is a close visual binary of two K-type stars (each slightly smaller than the Sun) around 11 light years from Earth. It attracted the interest of both astronomers and the science fiction community when variations in the binary orbit were interpreted as possible evidence for tertiary companion in the form of a super-Jupiter planet in 1942 \cite{1943PASP...55...29S}. However these data were superseded by others which ruled out this interpretation.

The pressure for writers to remain current with contemporary astronomy is evidenced by their numerous anecdotal accounts of interactions with readers who have noticed or engaged with the scientific content of their narratives, and in particular errors therein. The mutual understanding of this co-creative pressure was articulated by hard science fiction writer Hal Clement in a factual science article, Whirligig World, accompanying publication of his novel A Mission of Gravity in 1953:

While narrative necessity may override scientific precision where required, such 'games' lead to a pressure on science fiction writers (many of whom were themselves scientifically trained) to present an accurate representation of contemporary scientific knowledge in their stories.

However, while such simple considerations of habitability as stellar type and distance were common in the science fictional community (and mentioned by many authors in their forewords or explanatory notes on stories, and by fans in letters to the pulp magazines), for many of the pulp writers, the origins of their aliens would have been considered far less important than the nature of those aliens, how that nature can be used to reflect on the traits of humanity, and on how they can be used to construct a compelling and entertaining narrative. For these writers, star and constellation names are more likely to be used effectively as set-dressing, providing authority to the portrayal through use of familiar and plausible scientific names rather than as carefully-considered selections.

There are entire classes of planets now known (e.g. hot jupiters, sub-Neptunes, super-Earths) that were not even imagined in the twentieth century. Even for more ‘normal’, Earth-like planets, the unpredictable impacts of solar irradiation, stellar multiplicity and atmospheric composition on planetary (or extra-planetary) habitability are only now beginning to be understood. Not even the best read of science fiction writers could have reached a detailed awareness of these by extrapolation, rather than simple chance, and certainly could not have mapped them onto the vast range of stars present in each constellation in Earth's sky.

So, with regret, I have to conclude that the analysis presented in my paper and its conclusions about where to look for life is best treated as science fiction. However that does not imply that it is without value.

As science fiction has matured as a genre it has become apparent that the predictions of SF may, in some cases, become self-fulfilling. In other words, their apparent success is due not to prescience, but instead to acting as direct inspiration for later inventions. A famous and often quoted example is the design of early twenty-first century mobile phones, which adopted a flip-open configuration explicitly based on that of Star Trek communicators. Another frequently cited anecdote reports that when physicist Stephen Hawking visited the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation (TV, 1987-1994), he stopped at the warp engines and noted ‘I’m working on that!’. Indeed, actor William Shatner and science journalist Chip Walters based an entire book with that title on an effort to visit scientists who were inspired by or working to fulfill science fictional predictions (Shatner, with Walters, I’m Working on That: a trek from science fiction to science fact, 2002). Hawking provided a foreword to Lawrence Krauss’s 1995 non-fiction book The Physics of Star Trek confirming the incident. 

This is just one of many such efforts - to give another example, the Smithsonian published Joel Levy’s non-fiction book Reality Ahead of Schedule: How Science Fiction Inspires Science Fact in 2019. Amongst many other examples it describes how key atomic physicist Leo Szilard took inspiration from H G Wells’ 1913 novel The World Set Free when investigating the concepts of nuclear chain reactions in the early 1930s. Neither Wells nor Szilard was working in a vacuum. Wells was certainly aware of the early foundations of nuclear physics that were then emerging, and of Einstein’s assertion that mass and energy were closely related. Szilard was building on decades of research and conversations with his peers. But he nonetheless drew on Wells’ extrapolations as a possibility worthy of investigation [1]. Levy’s book also discusses the influence of H G Wells’ 1903 story The Land Ironclads on the development of modern armoured vehicles, pointing out that Wells’ story extrapolated from then current and in-development technologies, but that reading it was publicly credited by Winston Churchill for giving him confidence to support the development of the first tanks during World War I.

That isn’t to say that the realised version always works in the same way, or even has the same physical foundation, as the fictional inspiration: the idea that situations beyond the status quo may be possible is a more powerful motivator for innovators than any specific predictions on the methodology that may be invented by authors. Even more generally, the role of science fiction in inspiring future innovators to follow scientific or technical careers is increasingly well evidenced. Whether these newly-recruited scientists reproduce actual devices from fiction, or simply help to construct a technological paradigm in which those devices can be imagined and constructed by others, this is still a case of science fiction working towards the fruition of its own prediction. Of course, in most cases, the genre is only one part of a more complex web of influences and inspirations - but an important part nonetheless.

In summary then, articles which claim foreknowledge or that “science fiction predicted X!” are often misleading, and can lead to a misconception about what SF is and does. Instead we should be celebrating the futurists whose clear understanding of their present leads to extrapolations of the future, and the scientists, engineers and technicians who have brought a science fictional world into being, and who continue to be inspired by the possibilities that lie ahead.