It is remarkable that Lord Esher should be so much astray...We must conclude that an uncontrollable fondness for fiction forbade him to forsake it for fact. Such constancy is a defect in an historian.
The scientific facts, which were supposed to contradict the faith in the nineteenth century, are nearly all of them regarded as unscientific fictions in the twentieth century.
Science fiction is never about the future, in the same way history is rarely about the past: they're both parable formats for examining or commenting on the present.