Photo of the center of the Earth, taken from my phone at 2:36 pm today.
Before anything is built, an artist imagines it. In no genre is this clearer than Science Fiction. Moon landing? Imagined 150 years ago. Cell phones? Star Trek figured it out in 1964. Submarines were imagined fifty years before they were practical, in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Cloning? Go read, The Island of Dr. Moreau. Psychotropic drugs? Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dystopic? In the Time of the Comet and War of the Worlds by HG Wells, where Wells also imagined that isolated species couldn’t withstand the viruses of another.
Frenchman Jules Verne was the first popular Sci-Fi author, publishing Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1865. His most notable literary descendant was HG Wells. and a horde armed with limitless imagination followed, including: Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, L. Ron Hubbard, Phillip Dick, Frank Hubert.
Sci-Fi is not fantasy. Sci-Fi takes the direction pointed out by hard facts and extends them toward infinity.
Science says, how can we figure this out? Science Fiction says, what can we dream?
Jim Miner Author 