"The science fiction novels of the 1960s—as this two-volume collection of eight very different sci-fi novels testifies—remain enjoyable because they got everything wrong. They didn’t accurately predict the future of space travel, or what a postnuclear landscape would look like, or how to end intergalactic fascism. They didn’t warn us against the roads we shouldn’t travel, since they probably suspected we were going to take those roads anyway. And they definitely didn’t teach us what a neutrino is. But what ’60s science fiction did do was establish one of the wildest, widest, most stylistically and conceptually various commercial spaces for writing (and reading) fiction in the history of fictional genres. Each book is unpredictable in so many ways as to almost constitute its own genre."There were some really terrible arguments against the perspicacity of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale because Gilead wasn't a 100% accurate portrait of 2010's America. Of course not, stupid, that's not and never has been how great dystopian fiction works.
Similarly, it's absurd to judge great speculative works of literature on a scale of did / did not happen. To broadly paraphrase Samuel Delany, good science fiction is more about our present circumstances, scientific or political, than anything else.
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