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Comment by incision | Hacker News Reader

While I get that Heinlein may have intended to make genuine predictions...

"Heinlein carefully points out that all good science fiction writers tell a story first and prophesy second, using arguably the greatest of them all, H.G. Wells, as an example."

There's something I really dislike about evaluating science fiction as prediction in general.

A work of fiction can't be right or wrong, just more or less similar. Flying cars and geopolitics in the year 2000 are no more right or wrong than the color of imagined character's eyes.

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H.G. Wells differed from Jules Verne in that he was more inclined to let his fantasy loose.

The Frenchman actually criticized him for it:

   We do not proceed in the same manner. 
   It occurs to me that his stories do not repose on very scientific bases. 
   No, there is no rapport between his work and mine. 
   I make use of physics. 
   He invents.

And yet Wells, bold as he was, was often right (predicting laser, for example).

The irony is that one of Jules Verne's best known works is a physically-impossible Journey to the Centre of the Earth, whilst one of Wells' best known works conceives tactical nuclear weapons, radioactive waste on battlefields and MUAD before the structure of the atom was properly understood, and once the neutron was discovered a couple of decades later was acknowledged as an influence on Szilard's thinking when he actually identified the potential for a functioning atom bomb...

His utopias are horribly woolly, but for prediction Wells has few equals

Ursula Le Guin agreed with you: http://theliterarylink.com/leguinintro.html

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