IN “HIGH GROUND”, an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” first aired in 1990, a crew member of the starship Enterprise is taken hostage by separatists on the planet Rutia IV. As her colleagues discuss how best to respond, one of them draws an analogy with a conflict on Earth several centuries earlier—the Troubles in Northern Ireland—noting that they were ultimately resolved by “the Irish unification of 2024”.

As the 2020s dawn, the upheaval of Brexit means the prospect of Irish reunification no longer seems like science fiction. A poll in September 2019 found that a slight majority of voters in Northern Ireland were in favour of it. “We are still on track for the Star Trek unification timeline,” one fan tweeted. It is a striking example of a specific prediction being made in a work of science fiction. But despite perceptions to the contrary, such forecasts are the exception, not the rule. Just because sci-fi is often set in the future does not mean it is intended to be predictive. More often it is a commentary on the present.

I, Asimov

In 2020 (which happens to be the centenary of the birth of Isaac Asimov, a sci-fi legend), can the genre tell us about the future nonetheless? Set aside the aliens and the spaceships, and much contemporary science fiction is concerned with themes such as the impact of artificial intelligence, the danger of ecological collapse, the misuse of corporate power and the legacy of imperialism. Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, sci-fi writers have explored changing attitudes to gender politics—imagining, for example, future societies in which gender is irrelevant or people can change sex at will. Another vibrant subfield today is Chinese science fiction, which offers an outlet for subtle dissent, and gives Western readers a sense of the country’s hopes and fears. In all these cases, sci-fi authors are using the freedom granted by the genre to consider present-day concerns and extrapolate them to mind-stretching conclusions.

All of which does have some predictive value. It means science fiction can play a useful role as a forward-scanning radar for technological, social and political trends—but in the near term, not the distant future in which it is often set. This is the first of three ways in which science fiction can provide a guide to the future.

The second is that it can help broaden the mind when assessing future scenarios for planning purposes, both in government and in business. France’s Defence Innovation Agency is setting up a “red team” of sci-fi writers to propose scenarios that might not have occurred to military planners. Arup, an engineering firm, commissioned Tim Maughan, a science-fiction writer, to create four scenarios of what everyday life might look like as a result of climate change. Neal Stephenson, the bestselling author of “Snow Crash” and “Cryptonomicon”, has served as an adviser to Blue Origin, a rocket startup, and Magic Leap, a firm developing augmented-reality glasses. Tech giants including Google, Microsoft and Apple have also employed sci-fi writers as consultants, using a process sometimes called “design fiction”.

But bosses do not need to hire sci-fi authors to benefit from their expansive imaginations. Simply reading their books can help. Writing in Harvard Business Review in 2017, Eliot Peper, a novelist, argued that science fiction is valuable “because it reframes our perspective on the world”. Business leaders should read sci-fi, he suggested, because exploring fictional futures “frees our thinking from false constraints” and “challenges us to wonder whether we’re even asking the right questions”.

And then there is a third, more direct, way in which sci-fi can provide glimpses of the future: by inspiring people in the tech industry who want to make it come true. The creation of the mobile phone at Motorola was motivated by the handheld wireless communicators from “Star Trek”, and Amazon’s Alexa voice-assistant by the talking computer on the Enterprise. The Kindle was inspired by an electronic-book device in Mr Stephenson’s novel “The Diamond Age”, and an entire industry is trying to bring to life the virtual world he depicted in “Snow Crash” (see 2020 visions section). SpaceX, the rocket firm founded by Elon Musk, lands its rockets on drone ships whose names are borrowed from Iain M. Banks’s “Culture” novels; another of Mr Musk’s startups, Neuralink, is building brain-computer interfaces inspired by the “neural lace” implants found in the same books. The tech titans of tomorrow are surely reading sci-fi today.

This article appears in “The World in 2020”, our annual edition that looks at the year ahead. See more at worldin.economist.com.