BEN BOVA: It's only science fiction until technology catches up

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BEN BOVA: It's only science fiction until technology catches up
September 4, 2010
Ben Bova
naplesnews.com

t seems that whenever somebody disagrees with my opinion, they bring up the fact that I write science fiction.

Last month Reinhold Schmieding, president and founder of Arthrex Inc., derided my columns about the future potential of gene therapy, calling it “wishful thinking” and “science fiction.” This, from a person who runs a company that manufactures orthopedic surgical supplies, items of biomedical technology that just a few short years ago were (dare I say it?) science fiction.

You see, science fiction has a way of coming true. Not all of it, of course. But quite a bit. There isn’t an aspect of our modern world that wasn’t written about in science fiction decades, even generations ago.

Genetic engineering and gene therapy are as inevitable as television and artificial satellites, which were once to be found only in the pages of science-fiction stories. In a way, science fiction has helped to bring about all these modern wonders. Youngsters read science-fiction stories and get turned on by their sense of wonder. Wow! Maybe we could fly to Mars. Or cure cancer. Or produce a real cloak of invisibility. Or live for a thousand years.

And some of those young men and women go on to careers in science and technology and make those impossible things come true. Every astronaut who walked on the moon read science fiction as a teenager.

The first magazine devoted entirely to science fiction, “Amazing Stories,” began publication in 1926. Its motto had this to say about science fiction: “Extravagant fiction today; cold fact tomorrow.”

And so it is.

I’ve seen ideas I used in my own science-fiction stories become reality. One of my earliest novels, “The Dueling Machine” (published in 1969), laid out the basics of what is now called virtual reality: two people can engage in a deadly duel without coming to harm, because their duel is fought in an electronic simulator that gives each of the duelists the physical sensations — sights, sounds, even pain — of a reality that exists only inside a computer’s program.

Great idea, even though I didn’t recognize it at the time. But I was in good company. In 1946 Arthur C. Clarke invented the concept of the communications satellite — more than 10 years before the first artificial satellite went into orbit.

Considering the enormous economic impact of commsats, and how he had failed to even try to patent his idea, Clarke ruefully developed a lecture about the affair which he titled “How I Lost a Billion Dollars in my Spare Time.”

Science fiction does come true.

In 1976 my novel “Millennium” was published. It dealt with the idea that a defense against ballistic missiles would break the stalemate between the United States and Soviet Russia and end the Cold War.

Former President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which the news media derided as “Star Wars,” did just that. The mere fact that the U.S. was pursuing a missile-defense system broke the Cold War wide open and the Soviet Union collapsed — 10 years earlier than the date I had picked in my novel.

Alvin Toffler said that science fiction is the antidote for future shock. By this he meant that science fiction shows all the many possibilities of the future — the good, the bad, the exalting, the frightening.

Because science fiction deals with science and technology, two of the major driving forces in our society, science fiction can be very prophetic.

Not every science-fiction story accurately predicts the future, of course. But enough of them do so that if you read science fiction regularly there will be precious little that happens in your world that you didn’t read about years beforehand.

If you think of the history of the human race as a vast migration across the eons of time, then the science-fiction writers are the scouts who go out ahead of the main body of people to look over the territory up ahead and send back reports on what we can expect.

That’s far from wishful thinking. Mr. Schmieding should try reading some science fiction. It might help him to see what’s coming next.