Should Governments Read Science Fiction?
| AUTHOR | Astha Rastogi |
| DATE | September 30, 2026 |
| CATEGORIES | Governance Discussion |
The countdown before a rocket launch, that slow fall from ten to zero, was not an engineer’s idea. It came from a 1929 silent film, Woman in the Moon, in which Fritz Lang needed the seconds before liftoff to feel unbearable and had his characters count backwards. The engineers who later built real rockets kept the ritual, because Lang had already worked out how the moment should feel.
This blog is a companion to the All Things Policy episode of the same name, hosted by Astha Rastogi in conversation with Ashwin Prasad Rao. [Listen: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3L6bijR8u6q9evPz2zbvCz?si=e090311b37d34d8b]
That is the part worth taking seriously. The writers we remember for “predicting” a machine were usually doing something larger: imagining a whole way of living, and letting the machine fall out of it. When H.G. Wells put the phrase “atomic bomb” into a 1914 novel, he cared less about the weapon than about the century it would rearrange, a run of ruined cities and the exhausted world government stitched together afterwards. The physics came decades later; the social shock arrived first, on the page. Edward Bellamy coined the “credit card” in 1888 inside an entire imagined economy, a society that had abolished cash, where the card was simply how a citizen drew a share of a common store. He was designing a social order, and the card fell out of it almost by accident.
Sometimes that line runs straight through a single reader. Robert Goddard traced his life in rocketry to reading Wells as a boy, caught less by any machine than by the promise that people might one day leave the Earth. William Gibson, who in 1984 could barely work a computer, imagined “cyberspace” as a place with its own geography and crime and underclass, and a generation of programmers spent twenty years building toward the world whose mood he had already described. Freeman Dyson, reading Olaf Stapledon’s 1937 novel, took from it a civilisation wrapping its own star to catch every scrap of light, and gave the idea the arithmetic that now carries his name.
The film scholar David Kirby has a name for the mechanism: the diegetic prototype, a technology shown not on a workbench but in a kitchen or a car, handled by people who are not remotely amazed by it. What persuades an audience is never the device itself but the ordinariness around it, the sense that some future has already absorbed the thing and moved on. Once you can picture people wanting it, resenting it, leaving it charging on the counter overnight, it stops feeling like a possibility and starts to feel owed.
This is where it stops being a literary curiosity. Governing a new technology is a problem of timing, which the scholar David Collingridge put plainly: while a technology is still soft enough to shape, nobody knows what it will do to the people who use it, and by the time the damage is plain it has grown into roads and habits and business models too deep to pull out again. You are always either too early to judge or too late to act. Imagining the world a technology brings with it is one of the few honest ways to cheat that timing, to feel the consequences while they can still be changed.
Governments have started to notice. France’s defence ministry set a team of science-fiction writers, its “Red Team,” to imagine the conflicts the country might face by 2060, among them pirate states and the migrations that a wrecked climate could set off. Britain’s defence laboratory has paid novelists to write out the coming decades of drone swarms and machine-made decisions over life and death. Intel kept a futurist on staff to write short stories about the world its chips would land in. None of this is forecasting. It is a way of living inside a future for a few hours before deciding what to build, what to permit, and what to refuse.
The method has a plain weakness. A vivid story can take a government hostage as easily as it can warn one. The Terminator has done real harm to the argument over autonomous weapons, crowding the room with conscious killer robots while the questions that actually matter, about bias and accountability and who answers for a machine’s choice, are left to go quiet in the corner. And for every imagined world that turned up, thousands never did; we forget those completely, which is exactly why fiction looks so much wiser after the fact than it has any right to.
So the case for keeping science fiction near a policy desk is not that novelists can see what is coming. It is that they are trained in the harder discipline, working out how people might really live with a thing before it exists and setting that life down in enough detail to argue with. Read that way, as a rehearsal and not a forecast, a story earns its place in the room. It just should never be mistaken for the minutes of a meeting that has not yet happened.