Science fiction is often also known as ‘speculative fiction’, and, accordingly, it gives authors free rein to imagine anything they choose. While a gripping science fiction yarn needs plausible, complex, three-dimensional characters, a tight and well-structured plot, and a smooth narrative arc, it also needs sound science underpinning it. Years ago, in a meeting of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, George Scithers, the longtime editor of Asimov’s Magazine , and grand old man of SF editing generally, gave a most reassuring piece of advice to the assembled authors, fans, and wanna-bes. He said (more or less – this was back in the 1970s) that if there was sound science at the base of a story, then almost any sort of superstructure, consisting of proposed extensions to that science, would seem believable. It has been in the extension of existing science that SF authors have managed to occasionally hit on a prediction that actually comes to pass. In some cases, the hits seem to have outnumbered the misses. Let’s look at a highly selective sampling of these prescient authors and the inventions, trends, and events they predicted. America’s story-teller – a bit off-kilter: Ray Bradbury never even thought of himself as primarily a science fiction author, preferring to consider himself a commentator on the world around him. This fine raconteur has mined the rich vein of his childhood memories to create evocatively lovely images of the American landscape. Along the way, in amongst goose-pimpling stories like The Martian Chronicles , and Something Wicked This Way Comes , he envisioned seductive virtual reality environments. The privileged children in The Veldt inhabit a room that generates a 360 degree, full-sensory world, complete with patricidal lions. While we are a few years away from virtual large carnivores capable of eliminating inconvenient parents, just yet, how many kids are currently submerged in Saint’s Row, or Assassin’s Creed ? They are enjoying a virtual reality, for the maximum time between bathroom visits! A slightly different sort of immersion in media appears in Fare height 451 . The hero’s wife longs for a wall screen to allow full participation in the daily soap operas. Full wall screens are entirely possible now – they are just a bit expensive, thus far. She also wants to have them personalized by including her name. With a cable subscription or online streaming, such personalization would be possible even now, given that viewers register with identifying information. The Armchair Soldier: Virtual Bootcamp The virtual training of soldiers is the subject of Ender’s Game , by Orson Scott Card, and has recently been made into a movie, to mixed reviews. Returning to the novel after several decades away, this reader cannot avoid a frisson of apprehension at how current training for drone flying parallels the video game style exercises that prepare the young (very young – think tweens) in Card’s future Earth to remotely control weapons and vessels in outer space. A former national security employee noted recently the phenomenon of video game creators whose products are nowhere to be found on the commercial market, but who are nonetheless making income from somewhere – unspecified