The Philosopher's Stone is reality, satellites and fibre-optic videophones allow instantaneous online communication, submarines and chariots of fire take men to the moon and under the Polar Icecap. Chessplaying computers are now in the world champion league, smart chips run aeroplanes and cars, robots assemble micro-chips too fine for human eyes. Sheep are cloned, the atom has been split and fused. Millions willingly undergo a consensual hallucination called cyberspace. Scientists can predict earthquakes "" sometimes even influence the weather. These are concrete achievements that have all been articulated in fiction, years, sometimes millennia, before they became everyday reality.
Not that artists and writers are more imaginative than scientists "" they merely possess the social licence to demand suspension of rational, logical faculties when displaying their wares. Scientists can also let their visions run riot, but their ideas are critiqued mercilessly by their peers before winning acceptance.
Sometimes, when their ideas are too avant garde, they turn to science fiction (SF), as the safety valve. And sometimes, the feedback loop from fiction pops those ideas right back into mainstream science. In that sense, science is stranger than fiction "" it so often discovers ways of turning fiction into reality.
Where did the feedback start and what is SF anyway? Is it an omnibus label that includes the Vedas and the Bible as well as fantasies of alternative universes? Do you include alchemic texts? Do you include the stories of Cyrano de Bergerac and the speculative drawings of Leonardo and Cellini? After all, so much of what was dismissed as lunatic ravings was later transmuted into everyday fact.
Even if you restrict your timeframe to SF churned out in the last 150 years, much of science has followed a course predicted by literature. In many cases, perceptive writers have even projected the sociological and ethical problems which specific new technologies brought in their wake when they were hard wired into the technological fabric.
Between Verne and Wells, to name just two great SF writers, they broadly predicted most scientific developments circa 1850-1950. They talked about everything from submarines to rocketry to laser rays to atomic bombs. Transmutation is an incidental (and expensive) spinoff from atomic research. In homage to Verne, the first nuclear sub was even named Nautilus.
Not just the nomenclature, even the vocabulary of science is very often borrowed from fiction "" for example, 'robot' is a Czech word for 'slave labourer' borrowed from Carel Kapek's RUR. A 'Waldo' is a remote-controlled manipulation device used in dangerous environments such as inside nuclear reactors. Robert Heinlein conceived them in his 1950s Man Who Sold the Moon stories.
Arthur C Clarke predicted both the coming of instant communication via satellite and the advent of super computers in the 1940s. He ruefully regrets not claiming patents on his suggestions for geostationary communication platforms. The fictional capacities of Hal 9000 still exceed the current state of the silicon art.
Isaac Asimov created his laws of robotics and did an entire sequence based on mathematically-modelled sociological structures "" the psycho-history of his Foundation books. This was long before the actual advent of game theory and its practical applications to sociology. Asimov also invented Multivac, the self correcting computer who runs life, the universe and everything in his robot stories.
In the '80s, William Gibson coined the concepts of 'Virtual reality' and 'Cyberspace' in his Neuromancer and Burning Chrome "" which mirror a connected society circa 2025. Not only did the computer industry borrow his vocabulary wholesale, his books seem eerily prescient in their depiction of the virtual shape of things to come.
In biological engineering, the trends have already been mapped by Crichton, Harrison, Vonnegut, Dick and Niven. Crichton in his Andromeda Strain first bruited the concept of mystery viruses which turn into pandemic killers. The 1976 bestseller was followed by Aids and Ebola which followed the same peculiar infection patterns and reduced the medical world to the same level of helplessness Crichton predicted. The Grandmaster of small things, Isaac Asimov, came up with the nanotechnology concept in Fantastic Voyage where a team of humans is shrunk to enter a scientist's bloodstream. Research on molecular-sized paramedics is proceeding apace.
Robin Cook in Coma and Larry Niven in his Belter stories centred events around organ transplants and the criminal rackets involved in acquiring donors. Niven coined the term 'organlegging' decades before the Indian government realised that kidneys were integral to more than English cuisine. Cloning and genesplicing are both old hat fictionally. Both ideas with their ethical problems have a huge corpus of SF dedicated to them. The most famous novels being perhaps Huxley's Brave New World and Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep ?
Harry Harrison sprung the Gaia hypothesis in his first Deathworld story. This concept of viewing a planet as a single connected entity is gaining scientific acceptance among chaoticists as Fritjof Capra details in The Web of Life.
Soft science spinoffs arise from a freedom to explore the social impact of new genies being released from new bottles. Post-nuclear societies popped up through the '40s and '50s. Huxley's Ape and Essence and Shute's On the Beach were spectacularly successful books and films.
Brilliant sociological SF novels have come from speculation about population pressures and the changes it will force on society. Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar and Harrison's Soylent Green suggest future societies that encourage euthanasia and recycle corpses back into the food chain. Asimov, Clarke and E M Forster suggest underground or undersea expansion and manic agoraphobia as the likeliest long term reaction to Malthusian growth.
The Dispossessed (Le Guin), 1984 (Orwell)and The Man in the High Castle (Dick) are political fables. Each takes an ideology to its logical conclusion. Each has seen its apparently insane predictions coming true commune level up "" in Israel, Latin America and elsewhere.
In the '60s, Garrard delightfully defined feedback as the howling noise which results from minute electrical disturbances in its manuals that warned users to point the speakers away from the turntables. Mandelbrot created a whole new mathematics looking for tiny patterns of sanity that germinate inside the howling. SF is often lowbrow, abysmally written and unbelievable. It is also often prescient and true. Who knows what the next feedback loops from SF will generate in the way of scientific advance?
