What will 2050 be like? As our existential anxiety is fueled by a burning planet, eroding privacy, and geopolitical instability, it’s a question that big companies have to take seriously. So earlier this year, the international engineering firm Arup attempted to envision what climate change might mean for their business—and beyond—in 30 years.

To do so, they turned to Tim Maughan, who was tasked with crafting four different “user journeys,” written accounts that imagined potential futures. “I invented a person in these scenarios and described their daily commute to work,” Maughan told me. “Who has to rely on private transport, who has public transport, who has to walk or bike? That tells you a lot about what’s happening in different outcomes.” In some of Maughan's vignettes, climate change has ravaged the planet. In others, humans have taken action to slow the damage. Maughan’s job was to flesh out those futures in a series of descriptive sketches.

Rose Eveleth is an Ideas contributor at WIRED and the creator and host of Flash Forward, a podcast about possible (and not so possible) futures.

But Maughan isn't a scientist or an engineer. He's the author of Infinite Detail, a dystopian novel, and his vignettes are based in fiction, not fact. He's one of a growing contingent of sci-fi writers being hired by think tanks, politicians, and corporations to imagine—and predict—the future.

Arup isn’t alone in turning to science fiction writers for their future planning. Harvard Business Review made the corporate case for reading sci-fi years ago, and mega consulting firm Price Waterhouse Cooper published a guide on how to use sci-fi to “explore innovation.” The New Yorker has touted “better business through sci-fi.” As writer Brian Merchant put it, “Welcome to the Sci-Fi industrial complex.”

Each company uses writers slightly differently, but the premise is often the same: Imagine the future for us, they say, so we can better prepare for what might be coming. Science fiction writers may be hired to bring to life scenarios the company has already researched (as in the case of Maughan's contract with Arup) or to cook up ideas the company hasn’t even thought of yet.

It’s not just businesses, either. The use of sci-fi has bled into government and public policy spheres. The New America Foundation recently held an all-day event discussing “What Sci-Fi Futures Can (and Can't) Teach Us About AI Policy.” And Nesta, an organization that generates speculative fiction, has committed $24 million to grow “new models of public services” in collaboration with the UK government.

All this raises an important question: Are science fiction writers actually qualified to consult on matters of business and international policy?

The answer is one that divides futurists, writers, and academics. Some argue that there is power in narrative stories that can’t be found elsewhere. Others assert that in our quest for imagination and prediction, we’re deluding ourselves into thinking that we can predict what’s coming.

Futurism (with a capital F) is not just a way of thinking about tomorrow. It’s an industry full of experts with degrees in fields like strategic foresight or operations planning. The World Future Society and the Association of Professional Futurists represent a small but growing group of professionals, many of whom have decades of experience thinking about long-term strategy and “scenario planning”—a method used by organizations to try and prepare for possible futures.

For many years, companies that wanted help mapping out their futures would turn to these classically trained Futurists for guidance. In the past few years, the demand for such professionals has boomed. “There's a positive correlation between people wanting to work with futurists and the amount of uncertainty stemming from either geopolitics or tech or science,” says Amy Webb, founder of the Future Today Institute. And with increased demand, the circle of who gets to claim the job title of “futurist” has widened (something I myself might have contributed to).

But true Futurism is often pretty unsexy. It involves sifting through a lot of data and research and models and spreadsheets. Nobody is going to write a profile of your company or your government project based on a dry series of models outlining carefully caveated possibilities. On the other hand, worldbuilding—the process of imagining a universe in which your fictional stories can exist—is fun. People want stories, and science fiction writers can provide them.