SCIENCE FICTION, SCIENCE FACT

From space travel to robotics to lasers, many scientific achievements we take for granted were anticipated in science fiction—and in ways that might surprise us. But can science fiction writers foretell the future? Here, from Isaac Asimov, the master of speculative writing, is an intriguing look at the possibilities, and at near misses in science fiction’s predictions of science fact.

I’m rather less enthusiastic about this volume in “Isaac Asimov’s Library of the Universe” than some others, and I’m not entirely sure why. Perhaps it’s because the interrelationship between “real” science and sf is complex and varied, rather uninteresting to me personally, and impossible to treat in a scant thirty-two pages, however many pictures you include. I’d still recommend it to a member of the target audience, but perhaps a little lukewarmly. Adults, of course, should go straight to a book like Asimov on Science Fiction.