Are writers the true visionaries of our time?

What do you imagine a writer’s day is like? Well, if you’re a sci-fi writer in France, it may fall to you to figure out the country’s defence policy. According to a new report, France’s army has turned to writers to imagine potential new threats and scenarios that may not occur to more conventional military brains. It may seem a bizarre idea to get fiction writers involved in defence, but they’ve often been strangely prescient in predicting the future – so what makes writers such visionaries?

In Jules Verne’s 1865 book From the Earth to the Moon, the director of the Cambridge Observatory asked the president of the Baltimore Gun Club if it would be “possible to transmit a projectile up to the moon”, a question that was answered 104 years later when Apollo 11 landed. Verne was a pioneer – he also predicted the use of hydrogen as a fuel source and the electric submarine, among many other things – but he was not alone in foreseeing the future. H. G. Wells wrote of genetic engineering in The Island of Dr Moreau, and he imagined the fallout of atomic bombs in 1913’s The World Set Free. There are so many more examples, and it’s frankly outstanding that so much was essentially predicted. Swift even predicted that Mars had two moons years before it was confirmed.

Thus, there needs to be some kind of grounding in reality with a sci-fi text, which is then expanded a little into the fiction element

So what gives these sci-fi writers the ability to make these predictions, and for them to often be so accurate? I want to draw on a scholar of the genre, Darko Suvin, to try and answer that question. In a 1979 analysis of sci-fi, he created the term ‘novum’. Essentially, it refers to the scientifically plausible innovations used within sci-fi narratives (the plausibility differentiating it from fantasy). 

Thus, there needs to be some kind of grounding in reality with a sci-fi text, which is then expanded a little into the fiction element. Not everything that sci-fi writers predict will come true, but as they’re building on scientific reality, is it any surprise that scientists have caught up with some of their extrapolations?

Of course, there is another obvious question to ask in all of this – are science-fiction writers true visionaries who have been able to predict the likely developments of our future, or is it the case that readers have been influenced by their ideas and thus sought to make them a reality? Has science’s development of the robot, for example, been shaped by earlier writings on similar things, like Hoffmann’s automaton in The Sandman (1881), or L. Frank Baum’s Tin Man in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)? When Igor Sikorsky first built the helicopter in 1939, he fully acknowledged that it was Verne’s writings that inspired him, so this could definitely be the case for other advancements.

Look over to the US, too, and there has been a resurgence of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale as a way of reading the contemporary political framework

I’m not going to pretend that I can answer this question, but it’s telling that so many new scientific advancements call back to literature. As medical science progresses, doctors are accused of being like the eponymous scientist in Frankenstein. We often refer to our surveillance culture and increasingly overreaching state as akin to something from 1984 and George Orwell, and he predicted it back in 1949. Look over to the US, too, and there has been a resurgence of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale as a way of reading the contemporary political framework.

The French Defence Minister Florence Parly said that the country “holds all the aces in this race” for military innovation and, based on sci-fi’s track record, it’s hard to argue with that statement. Next time you’re worried about what tomorrow may bring, go and read a science-fiction book – the answer could be contained within its pages.