ABSTRACT
From Verne and Wells to the novelists of the 1940s and 1950s who anticipated the developments of space-flight, a significant proportion of SF writers have been listened to not only as social critics but as social prophets. Today newspapers, magazines, radio, and television supply an eager audience for the visions of tomorrow painted by novelists and scientific popularizers such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. Science fiction is viewed in some quarters as a branch of futurology, or the science of social forecasting. According to Heinlein’s definition discussed in chapter 1, the method of SF is in any case one of ‘extrapolation’ from the present to the future. The ‘tale of the future’ or future history has its own scholars and bibliographers, and is often assumed by outsiders to be coextensive with science fiction as a whole.
