Wells writes a book called ’Anticipations’ in 1901. It’s an essay, rather than science fiction, in which he sets out to think carefully about what the future brings. He gets some of it right, and lots of it wrong. Elsewhere he’s credited with inventing the tank and the atom bomb.

I’m not convinced. You can always find connections like this, and you can never absent yourself from the colossal benefit of hindsight… I suspect people will always tend to overemphasise the similarities and play down the differences, however subconsciously.

But I think to be looking for differences at all is in a sense to miss the point. The introduction to my edition of ’Anticipations’ walks through what Wells got ’right’ chapter by chapter and what he missed – this reduces his work to a simple series of predictions, whereas it’s really also a terrific insight into Wells and, by extension, the world he was writing from. ”The secret of Science Fiction”, says Matt Groening, ”is not the future… it’s now”.

Isn’t H. G. Wells said to have anticipated many scientific discoveries in his work too? If scientific discoveries are found by an imaginative leap I think that literary authors would be well placed to anticipate or predict such things. What does anyone else think?

Here’s a quote from Michael Whitworth’s study of relativity and modernism: ’While there are certainly some suggestive similarities, a retrospect of Woolf’s earlier novels reveals that Woolf had developed many aspects of her own wave/particle model of the self in anticipation of the physicists.’ (162)

What do people think – can literature anticipate or predict scientific discoveries? What are some of the famous (and not so famous) examples of such claims? What issues for thinking about the relations of literature and science can be explored around this question?