In today’s world, it’s easy to find technology with roots in science fiction. Everything from medical implants to clean energy and automation, from mobile devices and virtual reality to artificial intelligence jumps out of books and short stories by such iconic authors as Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, and so many others. Warp engines, space elevators, and reanimated dinosaurs? Not yet, but all three continue to draw research as authors push the boundaries of science with the question both have in common: “What if?”
Sci-fi’s appeal is universal. “It’s a big tent — a way to tell stories about science and technology and our hopes and fears for the future and share them across centuries, continents, and cultures,” said Lisa Yaszek, Ph.D., regents professor of science fiction studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “You can go almost anywhere in the world, and even if someone has never heard of sci-fi, they will talk your ear off about the ideas. And that’s a good thing.”
Dr. Yaszek is clear that science fiction authors aren’t prophetic, but that their “predictions” are a complex set of extrapolations. “They’re actually a lot like scientists but with more freedom to play,” she said. “They look for trends in science and society, asking ‘what if’ and building distant futures, perhaps giving scientists new vocabularies for things they either want or never want to do.”
Fiction fueling science
Star Trek is a perfect example of what Dr. Yaszek describes. Today’s stun guns and flip phones call back to the beloved TV show’s handheld phasers and communicators. The Enterprise’s “replicators” anticipated 3D printing of objects and foods. Automatic doors? Check. Talking computers and the “holodeck” of Star Trek: The Next Generation? See voice assistants, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality. “I’ve heard that Apple designers were encouraged to watch the show’s bridge sequences while designing interfaces because the actors had to interact with fake technologies and make them look real,” she said. “Even if that’s a myth, it’s culturally important.”

Science fiction was also exploring atomic energy and nanoscience long before they came to be. For example, Manhattan Project scientist Leo Szilard was inspired by H.G. Wells’ 1914 novel, The World Set Free, in which Wells combined the cutting-edge atomic physics of his time with British wargaming traditions and theorized something like nuclear weapons.
“Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman didn’t read science fiction, but everyone in his lab did,” Dr. Yaszek explained. “When he announced nanoscience as a potential field in a 1959 speech, ‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,’ he imagined a series of playful scenarios that could challenge engineers, like how could we build tiny cars for ants? How could we inscribe the Library of Congress on the head of a pin? A lot of these ideas came from small- and micro-scale engineering in stories that were circulating among his colleagues.”
Engineer and researcher Eric Drexler, famous for introducing molecular nanotechnology, is another example. “He was obsessed with the space race in the ’60s and ’70s and the problem of getting cargo into space,” Dr. Yaszek said. “Reading Arthur C. Clarke’s ideas for ‘space elevators’ on thin, flexible cables got him thinking about nanomaterials. Decades later, scientists and engineers are still working on this because we need something better than rockets if we’re going to build on the moon.”
In 1930, sci-fi writer Leslie F. Stone, one of the first Jewish women to write science fiction, envisioned what’s now the internet in her short story, Letter of the 24th Century. In two elegant pages, she creates a future in which people get everything from education and entertainment to health care and everyday shopping through an elaborate network of radios with visual displays. “Everyone moves their lives online to halt pandemics until they can engineer vaccines,” Dr. Yaszek said, noting an uncanny parallel with life online during the worst of COVID-19. “Stone lived through the 1918 [Spanish] flu pandemic that killed millions and wrote a future where technology could prevent them.”
Artificial intelligence races forward with tremendous potential for good. Yet the chilling voice of HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey still echoes. Ordered to open the pod bay doors by a desperate spacewalker it has locked outside, the rogue AI said simply: “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Those words, as terrifyingly fresh today as they were in 1968, are as much a warning as a landmark in suspenseful storytelling.
Women engineering utopias


Dr. Yaszek is particularly interested in how groups not always associated with future science and technology have used science fiction as a platform. “It’s been really interesting to study and recover the rich history of women’s and Black people’s work. Science fiction is a great way for people who might feel like they’re often the subjects of scientific inquiry or the targets of technological manipulation to voice their own experiences.”
As science fiction became a genre in the late 1800s to early 1900s, a group of women brought together new ideas about engineering and connected that with the emerging understanding of genetics. “They wrote engineered utopias, often sort of proto-solarpunk futures, which are invested in green and blue technologies and in working with the Earth rather than conquering and exploiting it,” Dr. Yaszek said.
She pointed to an early example of Afrofuturism from this group, Pauline Hopkins’ techno utopia, Of One Blood, published in 1903. The story revolves around a young Black American who is heir to a 7,000-year-old African utopian empire, created by Black geniuses who built an underground city that runs on blue and green technology. This secret civilization, protected by a cloaking device and a group of elite warrior women, anticipates the mythical Wakanda of Marvel Studios’ blockbuster Black Panther franchise many decades later.



The most famous of that group, feminist author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, wrote Herland in 1915, in which three American men discover a rumored feminist utopia in the Amazon. “They’re surprised because these women don’t build gigantic cities,” Dr. Yaszek said. “Instead, they tame the land and turn the Amazon into a paradise where every tree yields three or four delicious things to eat. And the men are freaked out because they can’t tell if the women are 16 or 65 because they all look great.”
Herland captured the energy of the first-wave feminist movement and women engineers led by Ellen Swallow Richards, a founder of the field of home economics in the United States. “The story was lost for a while with the revival of feminism in the 1960s and ’70s, but women mimeographed and circulated it among themselves,” Dr. Yaszek said. “To this day, when a woman writes a utopia, she’s probably playing with that particular story.
“Women have been associated with fantasy fiction since the genre’s invention,” Dr. Yaszek said. “In the early 1900s, they worked in translating and updating fairy tales, cleaning up older and saucier forms of fantasy literature for modern audiences. Not surprisingly, they soon began adding their own ideas to fantasy fiction.
“When women come to science fiction, they bring to it what’s successful about their other artistic traditions,” she continued. “But more importantly, they gravitate toward sci-fi fantasy because so often women’s methodical, repeatable, and effective ways of knowing the world have been dismissed as magic, often to make way for sciences and technologies developed by men. Fantasy lets women reclaim history that was once marginalized, stigmatized, or treated as dark arts.”

Dr. Yaszek is always spotting new trends in science fiction. “The fastest-growing genre in the last decade has been hopepunk,” she said. “These stories are similar to cyberpunk, often angry at the current use of science and technology for profit rather than people. But they’re also hopeful that we can meet these wicked problems with kindness, connection, and the exchange of ideas for physically and socially engineering better futures.”
Women join the adventure
Building better futures is one of the main reasons women become engineers. “In my mind, the next coolest thing to being the person to discover or do something is being the person who makes it possible for them to do that thing,” said Payal Singh, a controls engineer for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility. As a young girl, Singh read abridged versions of The Invisible Man, War of the Worlds, and The Time Machine. Later, she discovered The Dragons of Pern series, and she loved watching Star Trek, Star Wars, Dr. Who, and superhero movies.
“Human ingenuity is amazing, how years down the line imagination becomes reality,” Singh said, “and it’s fun to see over history how technology has changed. The best part is the discussions and trying to reverse engineer how an imaginary technology could work. For me, it was the levitating cars in Star Wars that sent me down a rabbit hole of (researching) magnetic levitation.”
Singh is also drawn to the societal critiques and themes in fantasy sci-fi. “I love how the characters deal with society-level problems like racial inequality, slave labor, [and] worker and human rights, and through their actions and decisions change the world,” she said. “It gives you hope that humanity can come together as global citizens, and even though there’s darkness in the world, the good guys can win.”
In the real world, Singh enjoys watching new developments in virtual reality. “I’d also like to imagine instantaneous transport across the galaxy,” she said. “I don’t know if it can ever happen but it sure would be convenient.”


For Jamie Krakover, aerospace engineer and senior manager for Boeing’s Enterprise Engineering Workforce Strategy, science fiction is the art of the possible. “There’s good and bad in every piece of technology,” she said. “How do we use it for as much good as possible? Engineering is about problem-solving in the present and future and science fiction is a natural extrapolation
of that.”
Her own “what if” moment inspired Krakover to write a cyberpunk novel for young audiences. “I was sitting at a stoplight and suddenly thought, ‘If you left your cell phone at home and didn’t have GPS, you’d be lost. What if we could never get lost again?’”
Tracker 220 is the story of Kaya Weiss, a young Jewish woman in a society in which everyone has a tracking chip implant in their brain. In this future, access to apps, health monitoring, and the internet’s infinite knowledge flows from that chip. But there’s a downside: It never stops monitoring. You get in trouble if you go offline, and authorities monitor every search. If you’re Jewish, you can’t have a tech-free Shabbat, so technology limits the right to practice your faith. To free herself, Kaya has to break the technology — and the system.
“I started writing the book in 2012, and since then, some of the things I was thinking about have started happening, like implants that help improve paralysis or that can type what you see. Retina scanners, facial recognition, ads that target us based on conversations our phones overhear. It’s cool, but it’s also sort of creepy.”
Book two of Krakover’s series, Authority, was published in August 2024, and she continues writing whenever she can. “Early in life, I struggled to find sci-fi books for kids that I liked,” she said. “So, I try to write what I would have wanted to read: sci-fi and fantasy stories that have strong women characters. We need more women in STEM, and books are one way to engage them.”
Fiction continues its playful dance with reality, as scientific discovery sparks further leaps of imagination. What new worlds will writers create as stunning images from the James Webb Space Telescope change how we see and know the universe? Technologies once considered the realm of science fiction have come to be, while many remain on a distant horizon. But as long as science and art keep asking “what if,” new wonders are bound to spring forth.
Time Travel Sci-Fi Is Science Fun


Of all the technologies imagined by science fiction, time travel is one of the most time-honored. “It’s a deep longing that I think we all have,” said screenwriter Bill Marsilii. “Time travel stories give you a unique possibility to try on different versions of what you should have done in a moment. If just one day or a couple of days don’t go the same way they did last time, isn’t that worth it?”
Growing up, Marsilii was fascinated by media on the subject, including Harlan Ellison’s Hugo Award-winning Star Trek episode, “The City on the Edge of Forever.” So, when he got the chance to collaborate on a time travel thriller movie spec, he went for it.
Déjà Vu (2006), co-written by Marsilii and Terry Rossio, is the highest-selling spec screenplay in movie history. Its premise: A domestic terrorist has just blown up a crowded New Orleans ferryboat. What if you could go back in time, stop him, and save 500 people, including the woman who could be the love of your life?
The idea for the movie that ultimately starred Denzel Washington as federal investigator Doug Carlin began with a one-pager by Rossio about an investigator whose girlfriend is killed. He joins a team that has a time window device that allows him to watch her last days and try to solve her murder. And then he uses it to go back and try to save her life. “I got very excited about it,” Marsilii said. “But I thought, what if he falls in love with her while he’s watching her last days? That could be really cool. The first time he sees her is at her autopsy. I’ve never seen a couple meet that way before!”
Marsilii also saw an opportunity to explore whether destiny can be changed or if it is predetermined. “Dr. Denny, our ‘Science Guy’ character, says that travel to the past is theoretically possible, but changing the past is not,” Marsilii said. “And when Doug asks if there’s more to it than physics, he said, ‘Look at it this way. God’s mind is made up about this. It already happened. It’s always going to happen and it will keep happening no matter what you do.’
“That’s one theory, and another one is that you can go back and change the past,” Marsilii said. “Déjà Vu leaves you wondering which of them is right.”
Science in action
The writers had already researched quantum entanglement, in which, under certain conditions, subatomic particles appear to remain linked to one another, even when they are separated by light-year distances, and changes to the state of one particle affect the other instantaneously. Theoretically, this linked state between particles could be manipulated to send information backward in time, allowing researchers to study time travel’s paradoxes — if not actually do it.
Brian Greene, Ph.D., an astrophysicist at Columbia University, consulted on the movie. Marsilii asked whether time travel, if possible, would be deadly. Dr. Greene explained the Wheeler Boundary in particle physics and that crossing it would likely be necessary to time travel because there are incredible energies involved. It would act like an electromagnetic pulse and fry your brainwaves, your heartbeat — all electrical activity in the body.
“We wrote that into the story because what’s more heroic than literally dying and risking that you can’t be resuscitated?” Marsilii said.
As to the energies involved in time travel, Dr. Greene offered a reality check. “We were saying it would take all the energy generated in the United States to go back in time,” Marsilii said. “Dr. Greene told us that wouldn’t even make the needle flicker; you’d need the energy of a midsized galaxy in order to do what Denzel does. But at least we made a nod to the fact that it takes an incredible amount of energy.”
Another of Déjà Vu’s mind-bending set pieces is what Marsilii called “a split-level car chase,” in which Doug wears a goggle rig that lets him see the road in real time with one eye and in the past with the other. “He’s racing down the road in the middle of daytime traffic chasing the terrorist’s car, and it’s not actually there. It was there four days ago, at night, in the rain. The fact that that sequence made it all the way from my brain onto a movie screen just kind of delights me.”
Marsilii continues his fascination with science fiction and time travel. His latest collaboration with Rossio, Time Zone, revolves around manipulating the speed of time and is now in active development at Amazon Studios. —SM
Does It Fly?
Science fiction meets science fact in a new podcast series featuring astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi and pop culture expert Tamara Krinsky, who put sci-fi technologies to the test to determine once and for all if they’re possible in the real world. Find the podcast at https://doesitflypod.com/.
Recommended Reading
For a curated list of favorite science fiction authors from those interviewed for this article, including Afrofuturist, Latina, Indigenous, Asian, Indian, Caribbean, and LGBTQ+ authors, click here.