Science fiction's influence on technology: ideas made real

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It's hardest to look at the day after tomorrow, according to Stross. His latest novel Halting State is set in a near-future independent Scotland. It starts with a bank robbery in a virtual reality game - and only recently Second Life shut down all the in-world banks after a spate of frauds and robberies. "It's really difficult writing near-future science fiction these days," he said. "I wrote Halting State in 2006, finishing it in September. By January 2008, we'd seen large chunks of the novel's plot coming true: bank robberies in Second Life and Ultima Online, international cyber-war between Russia and Estonia, and Chinese hackers attacking western (and South Korean) military computers. By 2018, when the novel is set, it's going to look quaint - I can't begin to project what the real state of affairs will look like then, because there's just too much going on."

It's rare that science fiction explores the effects of technology on business. William Barton's novel Acts of Conscience starts with a stock market boom driven by a new technology, while Peter Hamilton's series of science fiction detective stories set in a post-global warming Rutland also chart the rise of a technology company - looking at the lengths people go to get access to disruptive new technologies.

When science fiction mentions business specifically, it's often to paint technologically advanced corporations as a threat: a good story is more about building tension than increasing productivity. Some stories are intended as cautionary tales and when H Beam Piper wrote about the Zarathustra Company controlling an entire planet he was modelling it on the East India Company rather than proposing a way of funding space exploration. Worldbuilding is about exploring the impact of technology on society and on individuals, not on business. But Neal Stephenson gives Diamond Age a realistic flavour by artificially limiting what his nanotechnology fabricators could make, because you have to pay for the templates.

Fact is already meeting his fiction and if you're thinking about using 3D printers to run off components or objects to use in your office, remember to follow the increasing debate about which 3D designs and product shapes are protected by copyright.

Sometimes you can see the development science fiction and technology clearly. Neal Stephenson has seen two of his fictional technologies made real: the virtual reality in his novel Snowcrash has become today's 3D online worlds and Amazon has used pages from Diamond Age, a novel based around an electronic book in the sample pages on the Kindle ebook.

"The connection is so profound that it comes down to the only difference between science fiction and science is timing," adds Kamen. "Every generation imagines something they want to do and can't do, so they write about it. That inspires the kids so that to go and accomplish it, they develop the technologies and the engineering toolset.

"When you have the advantage of hindsight, it's rather staggering how much of what we do today is last generation's science fiction."

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