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 an exhibition devoted to sci fi opens 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 watch X 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, in From the London Times of 1904, written in 1898, imagined a communication network in which anyone could talk to and see anyone.

In 1905, just two years after the first powered flight, Rudyard Kipling imagined 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.

CCTV - Big Brother is watching you, George Orwell warned in 1949. Lunar exploration - Johannes Kepler first thought this might happen in 1634. 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, mentions things 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 of the 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 which London 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 the genre 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.

Alien monsters have not yet attacked the earth

"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 or wrong. "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 do this?', we can bring it about, hopefully, and we've got a transformed world."

But, while Professor Warwick believes that some technological advances might 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 also where its importance lies, says Cory Doctorow. "Science fiction writers do tell you an enormous amount about something really important, which is our aspirations and fears about what technology is going to do to society," he says. Stormtroopers are occasionally seen on the streets of Britain

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."