Could you be our new Sci-Fi Eye?

The Engineer's resident science fiction writer, Jon Wallace, is relinquishing his hold on our crystal ball, and we're looking for a successor.

Sci-fi Eye is a monthly column that takes a news story from The Engineer as its starting point and extrapolates one or more sometimes fanciful - but importantly, plausible - applications for the technology it describes as it is developed in the future, in the science fiction tradition.

The basis of the column is that for over a century, science fiction authors have used research current to their times as the springboard for their stories, with results that have often been eerily prescient (think of EM Forster and William Gibson's early visions of email and the internet in The Machine Stops and Neuromancer, to HG Wells' predictions of mechanised warfare and Jules Verne's stories of moon landings, and more recently, depictions of multi-touch technology in the film Minority Report).

In other depictions, the science fiction view of a technology is serving as the inspiration for technology development (think of humanoid robots in innumerable books and films, and back with Minority Report, personal aviation and autonomous cars).

9th January 2018