Parallel Prophecies: Science Fiction and Futurology in the Twentieth Century

Science fiction and popular science writing sometimes intersect-authors have written in both genres, and magazines have published their writing side by side. Producing "hard" science fiction depends on getting the known science right and ensuring that predictions seem plausible. There have even been claims that science fiction should be used to make science itself accessible to a wider public. This article uses case studies from mid-twentieth-century Britain to illustrate the range of attitudes adopted by authors and publishers who sought to associate the two genres and to probe the notion of "plausibility" in this context.