Human imagination often outpaces technological development and science-fiction literature stands as witness. Writers project what the future will look like, how society will interact with the world, but in projecting and recording these visions, they often manage to cast the future itself in the mold of their imaginationproving that the relationship between literature and technology is one of symbiosis.
“You mean old books?”
“Stories written before space travel but about space travel.”
“How could there have been stories about space travel before –“
“The writers,” Pris said, “made it up.”
Philip K. Dick – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
In the realm of science-fiction literature, the collective imagination has always had a close relationship to digital technologies. Part of building new worlds and imagining the future of human life with all that it entails, from details like currencies to the all-encompassing societal reactions to singularity points in fictional history, is a hyperawareness of the state of technology in present times.
The telephone makes its first appearance in Robert A. Heinlein’s Space Cadet (1948), alongside other concepts that would become a mainstay of the sci-fi imaginarium, not in the least the term of “space cadet” and the now ubiquitous idea of interplanetary military systems.
Technovelgy attributes the automatobil (a self-driving car with a positronic brain, much like a nonviolent Transformer) , the autonomous car intercommunication system, and the self-cleaning autonomous car to Asimov’s 1953 short-story Sally, while Heinlein is mentioned in numerous entries, both for automobile technology and for his work on different means of colonizing the Moon, Mars, and other distant worlds, with environmentalist tendencies. 65 years later, Elon Musk, the creator of PayPal and currently CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, would mention Heinlein’s work, alongside Isaac Asimov, as an inspiration for his whole career.
The advantage of science-fiction is that it bypasses functional limitations and harnesses the human imagination, offering a vision of the future unbridled by present technology. In doing this, it not only inspires visionaries like the aforementioned ones, but also sparks the collective imagination. This helps people like Brian David Johnson, a futurist working for Intel, when developing his technique for futurecasting – a necessary process for a company that needs to develop processors that will accommodate what a person needs not in the present, but in 10 to 15 years.
Arthur C. Clarke draws a resolute line and a fitting conclusion: “Science fiction is something that could happen […] fantasy is something that couldn’t happen”.
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