Why Science Fiction Can’t Predict the Future
(And Why That’s a Good Thing)

Blazing Reader,

"[Science fiction] has an abysmal record of making accurate predictions," says Hugo Award-winning science-fiction author Ken Liu. "Just look around you. The year 2000 has long come and gone, and we don’t have killer robots with humanoid skeletons roaming a post-nuclear hellscape, nor do we have manned missions to Jupiter supervised by a sentient AI nostalgic for its childhood. (To be sure, we do live with chatbots capable of writing haikus about Bitcoin—but one may well consider that the actual dystopian scenario). We don’t have flying cars, despite them being regularly predicted for a century and becoming de rigueur in science fiction milieus."

So if science fiction can't predict the future, what's it good for?

Modern myth-making, according to Ken Liu:

"Science fiction is, as many have long recognized, a myth-making literature, best understood as a young province in the ancient empire of fantasy. Like all fantasy, it draws from the collective unconscious, giving substance to beings that have no weight, voicing thoughts that cannot be put into words, depicting forms that cast no shadow. However, unlike other, older forms of fantasy, science fiction draws its metaphors from our scientific understanding of the universe.

For a deep dive into what science fiction is and isn't, check out Ken Liu's essay in Reactor magazine: Why Science Fiction Can’t Predict the Future (And Why That’s a Good Thing)

—John C.A. Manley

John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona, All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of philosophical fiction that are "so completely engaging that you find yourself alternately laughing, gasping, hanging on for dear life." Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber.