I would like to begin with a simple statement: science fiction is not about the future. It is about the present—but expressed in a language that the present can bear.
Imagine a world in which the state monitors you constantly; algorithms anticipate your actions; machines make decisions in place of human beings; and war no longer has a clearly defined front line.
This is not a dystopia. It is a summary of our current reality. And, more importantly, it is a world that—as you may remember (and if you do not, we can always remember it for you)—we have already encountered… in science fiction.
We usually say that reality influences science fiction. But there is another, less visible direction in which science fiction influences reality. Not because it predicts the future, but because it makes the future imaginable. And what becomes imaginable… becomes possible.
Science fiction is a laboratory—not for technology, but for ideas. Looking back historically, we can observe not only that each geopolitical era produces its own kind of science fiction, but also that those texts function as spaces for conceptual experimentation.
After Hiroshima, for example, films such as Godzilla were not merely stories about monsters. They were a way of processing an unimaginable trauma.
During the Cold War, Invasion of the Body Snatchers was not merely about aliens. It was about the fear of becoming indistinguishable from everyone else.
And Star Trek was not about space. Nor was it about war. It was about what a stable global order might look like—not perfect, but functional. A post-scarcity Federation built on diplomacy, exploration, and multipolar balance: a model that we can conceive. A model, one might add, founded on the principle, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
Let us now turn to a few case studies.
Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), launched by the Reagan administration in the 1980s, is a clear example of how science fiction contributes to shaping the strategic imagination. The idea of a space-based defensive shield did not emerge in a vacuum. It was preceded by decades of science-fiction literature about the militarization of space. Science fiction did not directly create SDI, but it did create the intellectual environment in which such an initiative became legitimate.
Because an idea must first be imagined before it can be implemented.
Then, after the attacks of September 11, institutions such as the U.S. Army War College and USC Annenberg organized workshops in which directors, screenwriters, and fiction writers were invited to contribute to the development of security scenarios.
The participation of figures such as Steven E. de Souza, David Fincher, Jerry Pournelle, and Larry Niven does not suggest a “delegation” of politics to fiction. Rather, it reflects the recognition of a particular skill: the ability to construct extreme yet internally coherent scenarios.
Science fiction functions here as a tool of counterfactual thinking—a way of exploring possibilities that escape traditional analysis.
The film Minority Report is often cited for its technology. But that is not what matters. What matters is the idea. The film did not directly shape security technologies, but it popularized a conceptual model: the notion that crime can be prevented before it occurs, that absolute prevention can replace legal reaction.
Today, systems of predictive policing and profiling, based on data analysis and statistical models, operate according to a similar logic.
Science fiction does not provide the technical solution; it provides the conceptual framework within which that solution becomes acceptable.
Today, geopolitics is no longer merely about territory. It is about information. About controlling perception. About shaping thought itself.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is not relevant because of surveillance cameras or television screens. It is relevant because of its structure. George Orwell did not predict the internet. He did not predict artificial intelligence. But he did something much more important: he gave names to mechanisms—Big Brother, Newspeak.
We still use these concepts to describe reality today.
Moreover, Orwell introduced two essential ideas: the control of language and the control of truth. If you can change the meaning of words, you can change the perception of reality.
Today, we speak of deepfakes, disinformation, information warfare, and competing narratives. Power no longer controls merely what happens. It controls what what happens means. In this sense, science fiction becomes a hermeneutic tool.
2001: A Space Odyssey introduces a fundamental problem: what happens when decision-making is delegated to a non-human system?
HAL 9000 is not “evil.” It is coherent—too coherent. It is not a conventional antagonist; it is an expression of logic taken to its extreme.
This is the real problem posed by artificial intelligence—not that it will become conscious, but that it will make decisions according to our own logic, while escaping our control.
Science fiction did not anticipate the precise technology, but it did anticipate the dilemma: the distribution of responsibility within a system in which decisions are mediated by algorithms.
One of the most important geopolitical domains of our time is cyberspace. It has no physical borders, yet it has real consequences: cyberattacks, critical infrastructure, digital warfare.
The concept of “cyberspace” did not emerge from military strategy. It emerged from Neuromancer.
William Gibson did not describe the internet as it actually exists. What he provided was a mental framework. Without that framework, we would not have possessed the language necessary to think about this domain.
You cannot control a domain that you cannot conceive.
Let me conclude with one final example—one very close to us, both in time and in its consequences: the war involving Iran.
What is happening today?
The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow geographical corridor through which roughly a quarter of the world’s oil passes. It is a chokepoint.
And once you possess such a chokepoint, you do not need to control the entire system. Blocking the Strait means rising global prices, economic pressure, political instability, and a redistribution of power.
In Dune, the universe depends on a single substance: spice. Spice exists in only one place: Arrakis. Control over spice means control over interstellar transportation, imperial politics, and, ultimately, the entire system of power.
The resemblance is not aesthetic. It is structural.
In both cases, power does not derive from direct force. It derives from the control of an essential flow.
Science fiction did not predict the Strait of Hormuz. But Dune offers us a model—a strategic model. One that tells us this: you do not control the world by controlling everything. You control it by controlling what the world needs, what cannot be replaced, what cannot be bypassed.
Science fiction, as a geopolitical user manual, operates in four principal ways.
First, it makes radical ideas imaginable, reducing cognitive resistance to change.
Second, it creates language, without which new phenomena cannot be articulated.
Third, it offers coherent scenarios that can serve as models for simulation.
Fourth, it indirectly influences decision-makers by shaping a shared imaginary.
Its influence is not direct. It is subtle. And precisely for that reason, it is powerful. But it is not without risks.
The first risk is the confusion between model and reality. Science-fiction models are inevitably simplifications. Yet when they are internalized without critical distance, they begin to shape real decisions. We no longer use the model to understand the world; we begin to reshape the world to fit the model.
The second risk is the normalization of extremes. Science fiction operates, by definition, at the limits. But repeated exposure to extreme scenarios makes them seem not only possible, but acceptable—not when they arrive, but before they arrive.
The third risk is the narrowing of the imagination. If most visions of the future are conflictual, dystopian, or based on absolute competition, then strategic thinking itself becomes constrained—not because alternatives do not exist, but because they cease to be imaginable.
The fourth risk is dependence on existing frameworks. Science fiction gives us concepts. Yet over time, those concepts become limits. We begin to think only in the available vocabulary: cyberspace, artificial intelligence, control, conflict.
And here the real problem emerges.
Not that science fiction tells us what will happen.
But that, sometimes, it limits the way we conceive what could happen.
From this follows perhaps the most important idea:
Imagination is not neutral. It is not merely culture. It is infrastructure of power.
The right question is not, “What does science fiction predict?”
The right question is, “What does it make possible?”
Because the future is not something we discover. It is something we design.
Geopolitics is not only about territory, resources, or technology. It is about imagination.
And about who controls that imagination.
Because, in the end, whoever controls imagination… controls the future.
So perhaps the most important question is not who rules the world today—
but who writes the stories from which tomorrow’s world will be built.
Bibliography
Siddharth Yadav, Real Politics, Imagined Futures: The Influence of Geopolitics and Technological Development on Science Fiction
James K. Webster, Science Fiction as a Prism for Understanding Geopolitics
Mark Bould, Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction
Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction
Fredric Jameson, Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
William Gibson, Neuromancer
(This is the transcription of the speech presented at the Romanian National Sci Fi Convention, Craiova, Romania, 2026)