In contemporary innovation cultures fiction, in particular about the future, influences how actors perceive opportunities, risks and responsibilities. Yet the forms of fiction that circulate around technoscience are not all the same. Some speak from outside of technoscience, some translate between worlds, and some operate from within practice itself. Clarifying these differences matters for understanding how futures are brought into existence and how they shape the present.

Our central claim is that different approaches to fiction a continuum between representation and operation. Science fiction (SF) is an artistic practice that narrates imagined futures to reflect on the present. Fictional technofutures (FTF) capture how elements of those narratives travel into corporate, policy and research discourses, where they are used to translate technical ideas. Sociotechnical fictions (STF) name the forms of fiction that act from within technoscientific practice, where statements that are not yet factual are treated as if they were, guiding agendas, investments and design decisions. The three overlap in practice, and any given object or statement can move along the continuum as its context and legitimacy change.

The paper outlines SF as an art form that renders the unknown intelligible while remaining largely external to technoscientific practice. We then introduce FTF to describe how SF-icons move into corporate, policy and research discourse. Next, we develop the notion STF to explain how imagination acquires performative force inside science and technology, where visions stabilize as operative guides.

The paper clarifies the distinction between SF, FTF, and STF, summarizes their dimensions in a comparative table, and outlines the relevance for technology assessment (TA), suggesting that recognizing the performative agency of fiction enables more reflexive and responsible engagement with technological innovation.

SF is an artistic genre expressed through literature, cinema, videogames, podcasts, and other media, that can be described as “the premier narrative form of modernity because authors working in this genre extrapolate from Enlightenment ideals and industrial practices to imagine how educated people using machines and other technologies might radically change the material world” (Yaszek 2011, p. 385). As a speculative creative practice, it uses science and technology as imaginative engines to explore their possible consequences, often through the binary of utopia and dystopia, while offering a broad range of perspectives on how material and human relations could be transformed.

For many works of SF, scientific and technological practice lies at the heart, just as SF itself has influenced the development of technosciences: they co-produce each other. However, SF artists often use emerging technologies as metaphors to criticize social injustices, to articulate social fears, or simply to tell entertaining stories (Broderick 1994, p. 53). SF is a social and political practice, shaped by culture and shaping culture at the same time. As Yaszek (2011) points out, SF can reproduce, challenge, or reconfigure dominant imaginaries of corporate expansion (Gibson 1984), militarization (Heinlein 1967), or masculine heroic individualism (Le Guin 1969). Toscano (2012, p. 22) notes that SF does not project futures for their own sake, but rather uses the future as a mechanism to comment on the present.

Science fiction is a social and political practice, shaped by culture and shaping culture at the same time.

At the same time, many engineers have acknowledged SF as a direct inspiration for their inventions, denying the social and political critique these stories entailed. The mobile phone and 3D printing were inspired by Star Trek, while Silicon Valley start-ups now envision uploading the mind (Mehnert 2023).

Since they rehearse possible futures and their consequences, SF works have also had profound cultural and conceptual influence. For example, artificial intelligence (AI) ethics have been inspired by Asimov’s ‘Three laws of robotics’ (Clarke 1994), and concepts such as the self-driving car have shaped not only discourses and research objectives but also entire industries (Stilgoe 2018).

Beyond its cultural expressions, SF authors have also served as useful instruments for various kinds of institutions. Since the 1960s, SF authors have been invited to advise governments, corporations, and the entertainment industry. Writers such as Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke contributed to RAND Corporation futurist sessions and military scenario workshops (Ghamari-Tabrizi 2009). In this regard, SF has long played a key role in inspiring young people to study science (Bova 1974, p. 9), and it has also been incorporated into curricula for teaching computer science and artificial intelligence (Goldsmith and Mattei 2014; Tambe et al. 2008). And although SF objects and tropes have recently been appropriated and emptied by technology leaders to reshape our reality, SF remains largely external to science and technology, since it approaches them from the outside. The following sections aim to shed light on the grey area separating SF and fact.

SF operates as a cultural commentary depicting fears and hopes of technological progress. Isabella Hermann (2023) suggests a continuum of two different readings. On one end of the continuum is understanding SF as a metaphor for fundamental questions about human nature, contemporary social issues, or the current structure of feelings. On the other, the depicted technologies in SF become inspirations for development or objectives for engineers on how to shape future technologies, a dynamic that Kevin Bankston calls the “Sci-Fi Feedback Loop” (Bankston 2019).

The term FTF captures the entanglement between these two poles of the continuum. It describes how technological imaginaries of SF shape research agendas, political priorities, and ethical debates, and how they are strategically appropriated by different actors to steer the imagination of emerging technologies. To speak of FTF, then, means to trace how these fictions circulate between culture, research, and policy (Fischer and Mehnert 2021; Mehnert 2024).

Thus, FTF refers to the discourses and narratives that lie at the intersection between SF and technological development and deployment. Examples include Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, introducing a new drone delivery method with the words “I know this looks like SF. It’s not.” (Bezos quoted in Carlson 2013); Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which resonates with cypherpunk imaginaries and SF tropes of conscious robots (CNET 2020); or developers of AI assistants explicitly recalling the movie Her (Barrett 2024).

The concept builds on the research on technofutures (Grunwald 2012). Emerging technologies exist solely in the way we think or talk about them, how they are visualized or textually represented. Jens Schröter explains this appropriation of SF by pointing to the challenge of communicating innovation within an audience’s frame of reference. SF semantics, he suggests, enable the connection with a non-scientific audience, for example in communication between research and industry or funding bodies (Schröter 2004, p. 32). Therefore, SF icons like the robot, concepts like cyberspace or the metaverse, as well as AI repeatedly find their way into discourses beyond the entertainment field and become adopted by developers as Leitbilder (Dierkes et al. 1992) to justify and describe development efforts. These discursive communicative appropriation practices contribute to the dissemination of the imaginaries associated with emerging technologies in SF.

In recent years, the tech industry has made use of SF to claim it would produce the future. For example, OpenAI founder Sam Altman stated that AI would be the technology humankind has always strived for, also arguing with SF references: “In a deep sense, AI is the technology that the world, society, people always wanted. Sci-Fi has been talking about this for a very long time” (Bajekal and Perrigo 2023, 00:01:09). Although AI is a popular trope of the SF megatext (Broderick 1994), AI is often used as a metaphor in SF to reflect on social topics. However, Altman does not address this reading of SF. Instead, he focuses on the technology as such and takes it as a predicted future. This process of appropriation resembles an elite capture of cultural imaginaries (Gerola and Robaey 2024), stripping away the critical use of SF by reducing complex stories to simple technological gadgets.

Artificial intelligence is often used as a metaphor in science fiction to reflect on social topics.

The notion of FTF draws on hermeneutic TA to explore how the ambiguity of fiction shapes real technological developments. This ambiguity emerges in the gap between the meaning the author attributes to a technology and the interpretation that readers create through their own engagement and sensemaking. In this process of cultural diffusion, technologies acquire new meanings and functions. FTF reveal how SF’s vast iconography serves as a shared reservoir of symbolic imaginaries that are reappropriated by technology developers. SF provides familiar anchors that help imagine and communicate half formed technological ideas. By borrowing from this fictional vocabulary, entrepreneurs frame emerging technologies as realizations of prior imaginaries, translating speculative visions into marketable promises.

STF has shown how the production of facts entails fiction (Latour and Woolgar 1986), how social institutions and governance rely on social fictions (Ezrahi 2015; Moglen 1990), and how technoscientific discovery needs operative fictions to accompany the emergence of new forms of knowledge and prove the existence of initially theoretical entities such as subatomic particles (Knorr Cetina 1994). As shown so far, scientific and technological activity relies on fiction as a source of inspiration, as a space for thought experiments and hypothesizing, and as a method to explore possible consequences of new discoveries and innovations.

The concept of sociotechnical fiction (Belsunces 2025a) contributes to understanding how imagination comes to matter from a science and technology studies perspective, with a focus on its performative forces (Barad 2003). It points to specific forms of fiction, different from those found in SF, that exist within technological and scientific discourses, rhetoric, imaginaries, visions, documents and artefacts. Fiction, as a type of information, performs differently depending on its medium and legitimacy. The haptic interface of Minority Report is not taken at face value because it belongs to a universe that is socially recognized as fantastic.

Contrary to this, artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a clear contemporary example of STF (Belsunces 2025b). Although sustained by tech gurus and the AI industry, AGI lacks consensus and empirical scientific evidence of its viability, and therefore can be regarded as fictional, especially considering that it has been repeatedly described as an almost godlike entity billions of times more powerful than all human intelligence today (Bostrom 2014; Kurzweil 2006).

STF explains how the legitimacy conferred by technoscience allows statements that are essentially fictional to be taken as if they were factual. Since they are perceived as objective or truthful information, they can perform in the world in a more direct and explicit way. Precisely because they are more easily produced than facts but are treated as if they were so, STF are particularly effective in displacing imaginary entities into the realm of material reality.

Unlike SF, which circulates through films and books, STF circulate through white papers, academic literature, reports, and financial portfolios. They are activated through forecasting, design fiction, and scenario building, and they end up influencing media discourses, regulation, investment priorities, technological research, and social perception.

Such fictions, legitimized and considered objective information, are performative on four levels. Epistemically, they offer intelligibility to emerging innovations, helping technoscientific communities make sense of what does not yet fully exist. They allow experts to navigate ambiguity and inconsistency, and to build the consensus needed to establish new technical and knowledge regimes. As a result, they help to reduce uncertainty, align expectations and imaginaries, and strengthen the credibility of emerging futures.

STF drive creativity, since they can move beyond causal reasoning. They participate in opening new avenues of thought and action, producing the aesthetic experience of surprise and novelty, and sparking curiosity and innovation (Beckert 2013). This capacity to create novelty also produces cognitive estrangement, which attracts attention and facilitates the spread of emerging projects and ideas that circulate through hype.

This connects with another type of agency. By bringing the not-yet-existent closer to reality, STF generate anticipation that is inherently linked to affective responses such as excitement, fear, hope, anxiety, or frustration – emotions also fostered by hype dynamics. The combination of epistemic, aesthetic, and affective effects makes STF normative. Presented as if factual, they foster expectations about possibilities and frame horizons to be pursued, thereby influencing decision-making (Borup et al. 2006).

STF are active forces in the emergence and stabilization of technological systems. Their performative power depends on who is able to make them credible, since not everyone has the capacity to endow them with technoscientific legitimacy. While anyone can invent, only some can make fictional statements appear as if they were true. When this happens, visions and narratives are taken up by influential actors who mobilize resources, credibility, and attention to extend their reach. Through this process, fiction becomes operational: It is translated into prototypes, policies and investments that anchor it in material and institutional reality.

Exploring the continuities between SF, FTF and STF allows us to trace how imagination and matter, future and present, visions and facts intertwine in the production of technological reality. Although different in nature – SF is a descriptive and artistic category, FTF stem from cultural and communication studies, and sociotechnical fiction is a notion rooted in science and technology studies – together they illuminate the multiple ways in which fiction, technology, and science meet and co-produce one another (see Tab. 1).