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INTRODUCTION
Sometimes it's a little hard to get people to realize that not only has the world changed in the past, but that it is changing now, and will change in the future. In fact, it takes something on the order of an atomic bomb to blast them out of their congenital complacency.
And it took the literally shocking violence of the atomic bomb to make the general public understand the fact that science-fiction is not "pseudo-science" (that's what you find in Sunday Supplements—fiction, pretending to be science) but an entirely different breed of thing—fiction stories based on science, and attempting to extrapolate the curves of past development into future years. On August 6, 1945, people suddenly discovered that that fool fantasy stuff about atomic bombs hadn't been quite so fantastic as they had—well, to be brutally frank, hoped.
Their immediate reactions were that a good guess or two, a chance, coincidental correspondence between fiction-fantasy and fact, didn't mean much. Still, relatively few people have learned to understand how science-fiction originates—why it does successfully predict.
The answer is, actually, that science-fiction's prophecy is to a large extent phony. It isn't prophecy at all, not in the true sense. It's more like the astronomer's prophecy that there will be an eclipse of the sun visible for so many seconds, on such and such a day, at a specified point. The astronomer's prediction is based on information he has that is not generally recognized—though anyone who wants to get it can go dig it out of the text books.
The science-fiction author predicts in the same general way. With the knowledge of what has been accomplished in the laboratories, and a general understanding of what people have wanted in the past, want today, and will probably want in the future, it's not hard to guess how those laboratory facts will be applied.
By 1915 it was generally known among scientists that there was an enormous store of energy locked in every pound of matter. Men have, sadly, wanted more deadly killing instruments for all human history—and will pay much more for a means of killing an enemy than they will to save a friend's life. From these facts it's a simple prediction that atomic energy will some day be released—and probably first in the form of a bomb.
Science-fiction made such predictions. When the laboratories found U-235 was probably capable of a chain reaction, the science-fictioneer began saying U-235 bombs instead of the more generalized "atomic" bomb.