Science Fiction—Portal To The Future

Dave Einstein, San Francisco Chronicle Technology Columnist

Stevenson Hall 1300
12:00 PM - 12:50 PM

If you can imagine it, you can achieve it; if you can dream it, you can become it.. When writer and theologian William Arthur Ward coined that phrase, he was talking about matters of the soul. Yet, it also turns out to be true for science. Since the mid-nineteenth century, when Jules Verne became the father of science fiction, he and many other writers have successfully predicted a wide range of inventions and discoveries that shape our world today. Things like electricity, the automobile, airplanes, space travel—and more recently, computers and the Internet—all sprang from the minds of science fiction writers years before science made them realities. Today, science fiction continues to probe the future, with stories of immersive virtual reality, FTL and time travel, artificial intelligence and biogenetics. Well-respected writers who practice hard science predict that in the not-too distant future, mankind will render the Earth unlivable. Are today’s best science fiction writers also reliable futurists? And should we be paying attention to them? There’s no time like the present to decide.