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Are we living in a sci fi future?By Tom Colls

Today programme

If you look out of your window, you will not see many flying cars. Most people are not walking around in

all-in-one body suits and you are unlikely to be getting around by teleporter.

We are living in a time that science fiction writers have been dreaming of for more than a century.

But, as anexhibition devoted to sci fiopens at the British Library, the genre's writers have to face the fact that

the world hasn't worked out quite as their predecessors imagined.

War has not vanished, nor are we living in a state of total war. We are not all raised in test tubes, despite all our

fears and hopes about genetic engineering, neither are we slaves of the corporate state, however much we watchX Factor.

The future, it turned out, is a lot more normal than any science fiction writer pictured it.

"No-one's got a good track record at predicting the future - throwing darts would get you better results," says

science fiction writer, and editor of the blog Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow.

"We are, as a society, no better than any other society at choosing which future to embrace."

Sci fi author China Miveille takes a tour of the 'Out of this World' exhibition

That is not to say that there are not some remarkably prescient predictions in the sci fi back catalogue, says

Andy Sawyer, who has guest-curated the British Library exhibition.

WHAT CAME TRUE

Credit Cards -Looking Backward

by Edward Bellamy, written in

1888, predicted cash cards.

The Internet - Mark Twain, inFrom the London Times of 1904,

written in 1898, imagined a

communication network in whichanyone could talk to and see

anyone.

http://www.bl.uk/sciencefictionhttp://www.bl.uk/sciencefictionhttp://www.bl.uk/sciencefictionhttp://www.bl.uk/sciencefiction

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In 1905, just two years after the first powered flight, Rudyard Kiplingimagined a world in which international trade routes were under the

command of air traffic controllers. This, he wrote, led to the disappearance

of the nation state and an end to war.

Robert A Heinlein's book Space Cadet, published in 1948, describes a

young star fighter using a mobile phone. And Ray Bradbury's 1953 dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451, mentionsthings that seem a lot like mp3 players and huge flat screen TVs in public spaces.

These coincidences, however, are precisely not the point of science fiction, according to three-time winner ofthe Arthur C Clarke science fiction award China Mieville.

For example, while HG Wells seems to predict space flight in his 1901 work The First Men in the Moon, the

spaceship he describes flies by means of a gravity-repelling paint. You shouldn't take the first part seriously,

Mieville explains, if you are aware of the second.

The point is, though, that science fiction has never been about predicting the future. If it happens to get some

things right, then all well and good: the point is the point of any literature -

to tell a good story.

"Science fiction engages with the real world. To that extent it is literature

which is about now, not about the future," he says.

So while some may champion JG Ballard's Drowned World - in whichLondon is submerged by the sea - as a warning against climate change, it is

no better or worse than another of his "catastrophe novels", The Crystal

World, in which people and plants turn into crystals.

Cybernetics scientist Professor Kevin Warwick disagrees. The sheer

number of ideas that appear first in sci fi, only later to be figured out by

scientists - space flight and robotics for example - demonstrate that thegenre has been very good at predicting the future, he contends.

The professor is like a character from a science fiction himself, having

becoming the world's first living cyborg in 1998 after having a microchip

implanted under his skin.

"As a scientist, you are a mini-science fiction person anyway," he says, explaining how in coming up with a

scientific hypothesis you are imagining what might be possible in the future, in order to then prove it right orwrong.

"If we say 'that's science fiction, we're not going to go there', we'll get there," he says. "If we say 'how can we dothis?', we can bring it about, hopefully, and we've got a transformed world."

CCTV - Big Brother is watchingyou, George Orwell warned in

1949.

Lunar exploration - JohannesKepler first thought this might

happen in 1634.

Alien monsters have not yet

attacked the earth

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But, while Professor Warwick believes that some technological advancesmight have been pre-empted, the big problem for both scientists and science

fiction writers is that no-one can tell how these advances will change

society.

And this kind of prediction, of how the societies of the future will look, is

both where science fiction looks most embarrassingly wrong, but alsowhere its importance lies, says Cory Doctorow.

"Science fiction writers do tell you an enormous amount about somethingreally important, which is our aspirations and fears about what technology

is going to do to society," he says.

Humanity is kept afloat in a pretty dangerous place by a thin raft of technology, he explains, and science fiction

moves this relationship "from the abstract to the visceral".

"You learn a lot more about what we as a society think is happening to [us] by the futures we embrace, than you

would about the future by looking at those futures."

Stormtroopers are occasionally

seen on the streets of Britain