‘The future is here today. It’s just not evenly distributed.’ That line, quoted at ASPI’s 2026 Defence Conference in June by then chief of army Lieutenant General Simon Stuart, captures the case this piece makes: futures arrive in ways our standard tools do not always prepare us for, and science fiction can help widen the aperture.
Predictive analysis, heuristics, and a widening gap
Predictive analysis remains the most common method analysts and policymakers use to imagine possible futures. The source describes that approach as “cognitively demanding and time-consuming,” requiring expertise and analytical discipline. Yet even when practitioners have the bandwidth, mental shortcuts known as heuristics skew outcomes. The availability heuristic is singled out: if an example of an event does not readily come to mind, people tend to judge that event unlikely. If analysts repeatedly draw from the same historical precedents or dominant narratives, the range of considered futures narrows and genuinely novel possibilities are missed.
How science fiction expands the catalogue of futures
Science fiction, the source argues, has long served as a collective method for visualising unconventional possibilities. The essay points to established examples where imaginative work pre-figured later realities: HG Wells’s 1914 novel The World Set Free imagined the use of atomic bombs “three decades before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” and John Brunner’s 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar conceptualised a unified Europe, China’s rise as a global power and Detroit’s economic decline. By presenting unfamiliar systems and settings, such fiction forces readers to challenge assumptions about how things must operate.
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Protect the town officeState and military experiments with fiction
Governments and armed forces have not been shy about tapping fiction as an analytical tool. The source lists several concrete examples: novelists Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle advocated for US president Ronald Reagan to create the missile defence system now known as the Star Wars program. In 2005 the Canadian Army commissioned Karl Schroeder’s Crisis in Zefra, a dramatised scenario about how a peacekeeping force might confront a 2025 urban insurgency using drones and modern information systems — a scenario the author notes is “not unlike today’s conflict in Ukraine.” In 2019 the French Army announced a team of science-fiction writers tasked with imagining how states and terrorists might exploit future technology. In 2023 the British Ministry of Defence hired PW Singer and August Cole to write eight short stories on how emerging technologies could shape future warfare. And at ASPI’s 2026 Defence Conference, Lieutenant General Simon Stuart invoked William Gibson to underline the uneven arrival of future technologies across institutions and geographies.
Cognitive benefits: reducing load and broadening judgment
The source identifies two analytic advantages science fiction provides. First, it reduces cognitive load: rather than building scenarios from scratch, readers encounter “ready-made” possible worlds that can be adapted into analysis. Second, it counteracts the availability heuristic by expanding the catalogue of examples an analyst can summon, so judgments about likelihood are less anchored to history or a narrow set of precedents. Combined, these benefits make it easier and less reputationally risky to entertain radically different outcomes inside institutional settings.
What this means for analysts, policymakers, and military planners
- Analysts — Could use science fiction as a low-cost tool to stress-test assumptions and to seed unconventional scenarios into structured analysis, thereby widening the set of possibilities considered without requiring full predictive retooling.
- Policymakers — Have existing models to emulate: commissioning writers or commissioning fictionalised scenarios has been done by the Canadian Army, the French Army and the British Ministry of Defence, offering a track to explore non-traditional threats and the societal impacts of emerging technologies.
- Military planners — Can treat imaginative narratives as a way to rehearse deterrence and operational assumptions; the use of fiction in defence contexts — including the examples cited — shows how stories can surface risks that conventional forecasting misses.
The central, evidence-based claim: predictive analysis alone is unlikely to keep pace with growing unpredictability, and incorporating imaginative work can widen analytical horizons at low cost and little institutional risk. The author stops short of prescribing mandatory programmes — “I’m not suggesting anything as radical as the start of a mandatory reading program for analysts” — but suggests that more exposure to speculative narratives could shrink the lag between unprecedented events and adequate institutional response.
If planners, analysts and ministers take the source at its word, the practical follow-up is modest: use fiction deliberately to surface assumptions, commission dramatized scenarios where appropriate, and treat imaginative work as a complement — not a replacement — for disciplined predictive analysis. The record in the source shows that states already do this; the remaining question is whether wider, routine engagement with imagined futures will become part of how institutions prepare for the unforeseen.
