Science Fiction, The Present, The Past, And The Future.

If you look at the first science fiction books, and the effects they had, and the real world inventions they inspired, I am quite sure you will be amazed. Ever notice the similarity between SkyNet and cloud computing? How about the similarity between a Star Trek communicator and a cellphone? 

Or, reaching back to the great grandfather of sci-fi, The War Of The World by H.G. Wells, it was the first book to ever depict aliens as hostile invaders, it depicted chemical weaponry well before it's use in WWI, it even depicted lasers decades before one was every made. Science fiction authors frequently imagine the future, and though they tend to be way of in the broad strokes (for instance, we have yet to have returned to the moon as was depicted in 2001 Space Odyssey), but they have a remarkable tendency to be quite correct with regards to the technology, now weather the story’s of the writers inspire the inventors, or inventor comes up with the idea on his own, I can't say. What I can say is that if half of history's profits were as accurate as science fiction writers at predicting the future, the world should have been destroyed a thousand times over by now.