Science fiction has rarely been about predicting the future; it has mostly been a reflection of today – and that’s part of the reason I continue to read it even when I’m mad at the physics.
I think back to when I was 12 and was going through my Dad’s used book collection. I came upon something that caught my eye, and I knew it wasn’t really about ray guns and rocket ships. It was about us – about what we hope for, and what scares the heck out of us.
A few decades later I’d find myself in conference rooms discussing satellite design while thinking about some story I’d read the night before. My fellow engineers thought I was crazy, but what they didn’t understand is that the best science fiction authors understood something my engineering textbooks never did. They understood that every technological advancement comes down to a choice of who we want to be.
Take Star Trek – my dad was absolutely obsessed with Star Trek from day one. He taped every single episode and wore them out by re-watching them. By the time I was 11 those episodes became my daily after school routine. From an engineering perspective, Star Trek is absolute garbage – transporters violate fundamental physics, warp drives ignore relativity and I’ll leave it alone at the point of artificial gravity that magically works when the rest of the ship’s power is off.
But none of that mattered. What mattered was this vision of humans who’ve figured out how to stop killing each other long enough to go to the stars. Gene Roddenberry wasn’t writing a technical manual – he was describing a future where technology is used to serve humanity rather than destroy it. To see Kirk and his crew solve problems using diplomacy and science rather than more bullets, that left a mark on my 12 year old self that followed me through the entirety of my engineering career.
The timing couldn’t have been better either. We were in the late 1960s/early 1970s – we had just landed men on the moon and everything seemed possible. Star Trek was a representation of that optimism – that if we could develop the rocketry required to break free of Earth’s gravitational pull, we could possibly break free of our worse selves. The AI in Star Trek was not some existential threat – it was Data trying to become more human. Their FTL travel was not a means of war – it was a means of exploration and understanding.
I took that optimism with me to MIT, to my first job designing propulsion systems, to 40 years of actual space engineering and somewhere along the line the stories began to change or I simply began to notice things I hadn’t noticed previously.
The Expanse was a wake-up call for me. I found it by accident roughly five years into my retirement – finally had the time to watch TV again – and by the end of the first episode I was both intrigued and terrified. Here was a show that got the orbital mechanics correct (for the most part) understood how actual space travel works but used that accurate science to tell a story that was much darker than Roddenberry’s Federation.
As an engineer I appreciated the fact that the science in The Expanse was at least physically plausible. Spaceships decelerate via burning fuel, there is no artificial gravity except through acceleration and space battles follow the same physical laws as those that govern actual space battles. That realistic science supports a story about humanity that has spread throughout the solar system and is already fighting over resources and territory – just like we’ve always fought over resources and territory but with bigger and more expensive weapons and longer supply lines.
Watching the battle between Earth, Mars and the Belt over water and shipping routes made me reflect on budget meetings I attended as an engineer where the topic was the satellite contract we were bidding on while people starved. The same petty politics and the same desire for power were played out on a larger scale. It was like Star Trek’s dark twin – the same technological options but a completely different set of values being applied to them.
What really bothered me was how relevant it seemed. I’m watching this show about resource wars and totalitarian regimes in 2018-2019, and I look out at the world and think “Yes, that sounds familiar.” The Belt’s struggle for autonomy from Earth reminded me of every independence movement I’ve ever lived through. The water shortage on Mars was reminiscent of every environmental disaster I’ve ever witnessed. The Expanse wasn’t predicting the future – it was explaining the present using advanced propulsion systems and asteroid mining.
At that point I finally realised what Science Fiction does. It takes our current fears and dreams and extrapolates them using speculation and uses that to force us to consider what we may become. Star Trek was created during the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Race – it imagined us at our best. The Expanse was written during a time of global warming and increasing authoritarianism – it imagined us at our most human, which included our worst.
Then there’s stuff like Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson that I picked up on a recommendation from a young engineer that thought I might enjoy some “Classic Cyberpunk” (Classic). Yeah thanks kid. But he was right – Stephenson’s corporate dystopia resonated differently when you’ve spent your entire career working for corporations whose first priority is shareholder value above almost everything else, including the functionality of the actual product you’re making.
When I first read Snow Crash in the 1990s the VR aspects seemed absurd. But now my grandchildren are wearing VR headsets and are living half of their social lives online and Stephenson’s warning about corporate control of virtual spaces doesn’t seem quite so far fetched. Stephenson wasn’t predicting the specifics of the technology – he was asking what happens when we allow profit motive to guide the development of technology without regard to the human cost.
That’s the pattern I keep seeing. The best Science Fiction is not about the gadgetry – it’s about the choices we make about the gadgetry. Do we use Artificial Intelligence to increase productivity and free humans for more fulfilling pursuits or do we use it to maximise profits and eliminate jobs? Do we use Genetic Engineering to cure disease or create new inequalities? Do we use space travel to increase human knowledge and cooperation or simply export our existing conflicts to new environments?
Each Science Fiction story is essentially asking: “If we could do X what would that say about who we really are?” And the answers vary from Star Trek’s optimistic view of humanity to Snow Crash’s corporate dystopia, with many others in between. What fascinates me is how the same technological possibilities can support a wide variety of different views based on the author’s view of human nature.
After spending my entire career in actual Aerospace Engineering, I’ve seen both ends of this spectrum play out in real-time. I’ve worked with talented individuals who were genuinely interested in expanding human knowledge and capability through space exploration. I’ve also sat in meetings where the primary concern was how cheaply we could build something so we could undercut the competition, regardless of performance or safety. The same technology – two completely different sets of values driving its development.
For that reason, I believe Science Fiction will remain vital, and even necessary, for us to consider the implications of the rapidly advancing technological changes we are experiencing, even when — especially when — it gets the science wrong. We’re experiencing the fastest rate of technological change in human history and we desperately need stories that give us a way to think through the implications, not just the technical implications, I can calculate those myself, but the human implications.
What kind of people do we want to be when we possess these new capabilities? How do we ensure we maintain human dignity and cooperation in an era of Artificial Intelligence and Genetic Modification? How do we prevent technology from enhancing our worst traits while still allowing us to experience the benefits of technology?
Science Fiction provides a safe way to explore these issues in imagination before we have to deal with them in reality. The stories that have stayed with me are not the ones that got the technical details correct — they are the ones that seriously examine what our choices about technology reveal about our values.
So yes, I’m still reading Science Fiction at 68, I’m still frustrated with the number of Science Fiction writers who get the physics wrong, I’m still debating with my wife about how I should be spending my retirement. But having spent 40 years in actual Technology Development, I’m convinced these imaginative explorations are not merely entertainment — they are preparation for the most critical decisions we’ll have to make as a species.
Whether we decide to pay attention or not, the future is coming. Science Fiction simply gives us the opportunity to think about it first.
John spent forty years designing real spacecraft before turning his attention to fictional ones. Writing from Oregon, he brings a scientist’s curiosity to sci-fi—separating good speculation from bad physics while keeping his sense of wonder firmly intact.