Science fiction and the science on which it’s based have long had a dynamic relationship – sometimes nurturing, sometimes oppositional. ‘Where are our flying cars?’ became a plaintive cry of disappointment as the millennium arrived, reflecting the prevailing mood that science and technology had failed to live up to the most fanciful promises of early 20th-century science fiction.
Science fiction’s predictive score is not particularly high, and depends more on its sheer multiplicity of ideas than on carefully extrapolated technological marvels.
But it is not the task of science fiction to predict the future. Rather, SF gives us a way of thinking about humanity as a work in progress and contemplating what we might become. Science fiction proposes and examines possible futures, it extrapolates from contemporary problems and trends, but what it illuminates is the present.
This might be more generally true with extremely negative outcomes, as we seem to produce more dystopias than utopias. We don’t have much of a cultural expectation of dashing utopian yarns. Ted Chiang says that science fiction is especially well suited to asking philosophical questions, such as questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know. When philosophers propose thought experiments as a way of analyzing certain questions, their thought experiments often sound a lot like science fiction.
Corporations now regularly hire SF writers to create fictional prototypes, thought experiments, and what-if stories about potentially marketable Products. Le Guin, however, holds that fiction, as a creative endeavor, necessarily sets limits in how it depicts reality.
Science fiction sometimes seems more surreal than extrapolative. Philip K. Dick’s work, in which daily life becomes very strange, is probably the best-known example; Rudy Rucker calls his related mode of altered reality transrealism.
One of the joys of reading science fiction is that we are tossed into an incomprehensible world that eventually resolves into meaning. It’s a microcosm of the human experience, except that you can figure it out and resolve your adventure within a few hundred pages.
Science fiction, whether it relates to Utopia or the opposite, can prepare its readers for change and for the shock of the new. Change is a human condition.