I came across a fascinating piece by historian Jill Lepore in Wired this week that put words to something I’ve been thinking about for a while.
Silicon Valley’s billionaires love science fiction.
That’s hardly surprising. Science fiction has inspired generations of scientists and engineers to build things that once seemed impossible. But Lepore makes a more interesting argument: some of today’s most powerful technologists aren’t merely inspired by science fiction. They seem to be treating it as an instruction manual.
The problem is that they may have missed what the stories were trying to say.
The Warning Was the Point
Lepore offers a wonderful example in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, one of the books Elon Musk has frequently cited as an influence.
Musk has said he took from Douglas Adams the idea that finding the right question is often harder than finding the answer. Fair enough. But Lepore points out that this is an extraordinarily narrow reading of a book that mercilessly satirizes bureaucracy, wealth, imperialism, corporate power, and humanity’s tendency to believe itself far more important than it actually is.
That’s what science fiction does at its best.
The spaceships aren’t necessarily the point. Neither are the robots, artificial intelligence, distant planets, or miraculous technologies. They’re tools writers use to take something about humanity and turn the dial until we can see it more clearly.
George Orwell wasn’t providing instructions for building a surveillance state in 1984. Philip K. Dick wasn’t suggesting that corporations manufacture artificial humans. And Douglas Adams certainly wasn’t proposing that we demolish planets and build luxury replacements.
Yet something strange happens when technological ambition encounters science fiction: the metaphor can become the objective.
From Fiction to Business Plan
This feels particularly relevant after Elon Musk’s comments last week about autonomous factories on the Moon eventually supporting a space economy perhaps 1,000 times larger than Earth’s.
As I wrote recently, that’s terrific science fiction.
It’s considerably more complicated as an engineering plan.
And that’s the distinction that keeps getting lost.
Science fiction has the luxury of asking what if? A novelist can imagine lunar factories, artificial intelligence surpassing humanity, uploaded consciousness, or civilizations spreading throughout the solar system.
But good science fiction immediately asks another question:
Then what?
What happens to the people?
What happens to society?
Who controls the technology?
Who benefits from it?
What goes wrong?
Those aren’t annoying details standing in the way of the exciting future. They’re often the entire point of the story.
Science Fiction Isn’t Prediction
This is something I’ve thought about a great deal as a science-fiction writer. I’m fascinated by technology. I spent much of my career building it. But when I write fiction, the technology is rarely what the story is ultimately about.
In Ares, Mars provides the environment, but the story is about ambition, secrecy, leadership, and survival.
In Infernum, extraordinary technology expands what’s possible while creating moral choices its characters cannot escape.
And in The Quantum Mirror, quantum technology provides the mystery, but the deeper questions concern identity, memory, grief, and the stories people tell themselves in order to survive.
That’s what makes science fiction valuable. Not that it tells us what the future will look like, but providing a laboratory for examining what the future might do to us.
Maybe They Should Read the Ending
I don’t agree with everything in Lepore’s argument, but I think she’s onto something important.
We should absolutely allow science fiction to inspire us. Some extraordinary technologies exist precisely because someone first encountered the idea in a novel or movie and wondered whether it could become real.
But inspiration isn’t instruction.
When a science-fiction writer constructs an enormous technological future, the interesting part usually isn’t the shiny machine—it’s what happens afterward.
Perhaps before all the aspiring technologists start building the futures imagined in their favorite science-fiction books, they should make sure they’ve understood why the authors imagined them in the first place.
And maybe—just maybe—they should read all the way to the end.
Jayson L. Adams is a technology entrepreneur, artist, and the award-winning author of The Quantum Mirror, Ares, and Infernum.
His novels blend high-stakes science fiction, psychological tension, and character-driven suspense. Explore the books at www.jaysonadams.com.