ReFuture at Troynovant:
reflections on the history of science fiction
(the nostalgic days of a great future)
and the progress of fantasy
(the open field beyond the gate);
listed by Title
  

Our concept of the History of Science Fiction may not closely match anyone else's view. We do want especially to convey that it is a rich and complex history, a self-conscious creation of the modern, creative, pro-individual, technological and forward-looking West. And that science fiction is precisely the literature which helps us to look forward and to manage our potential futures.

Our related concept of the Progress of Fantasy is that works of myth and fancy and dream which are most thoughtful and noblest in intention, must inherently and inevitably seek — through evocation of the timeless — to carry the past into the present and to shape the real futures before us.
  

  
A more pressing problem — it was the one Tolkien continually faced — was that of converting image into story. John Rateliff has suggested ... in [Flieger & Hostetter's] Tolkien's 'Legendarium', that the famous discussion of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien (recorded most clearly in [Tolkien's] Letters p. 378) to write a story each, the one about space-travel, the other about time-travel, was triggered by Lewis's reading of Charles Williams and realization that it was possible to write such a thing as a 'philosophical thriller'. ...

Mr. Rateliff argues that Tolkien was getting there, and that the story might have succeeded as a 'philosophical thriller' if Tolkien's attention and his energies had not been drawn off by the many problems connected with getting The Hobbit into print, in 1937, but the contrast with Lewis's companion-piece is not encouraging. Five thousand words into Out of the Silent Planet, its hero has been kidnapped and is on a space-ship heading for Mars on a mission of conquest. Five thousand words into 'The Lost Road' and the characters are still considering the history of languages, the story as yet invisible.

T. A. Shippey
J.R.R. Tolkien:
Author of the Century  (2000)
  

  
[Inverness, Macbeth's castle.]

Lady Macbeth {to Macbeth}:

Thy letters have transported me beyond
This ignorant present, and I feel now
The future in the instant.

William Shakespeare
Macbeth, 1.5.54-56

  
Knowledge's lure. — A look through the portal of science affects passionate spirits like the magic of all magic; and in the process such spirits presumably become fantasists or, under propitious circumstances, poets: so vehement is their craving for the happiness of the knowledgeable. Doesn't it course through all your senses — this tone of sweet allure with which science proclaimed its glad tidings, in a hundred phrases and in the hundred and first and fairest: "Let delusion disappear! Then 'woe is me!' will also have disappeared; and with the 'woe is me' the woe will also go." (Marcus Aurelius)

Friedrich Nietzsche
Thoughts on the Presumptions of Morality, #450
Dawn
translated by Brittain Smith

  
The intellectual methods of science do not differ in kind from those applied by the common man in his daily mundane reasoning. The scientist uses the same tools which the layman uses; he merely uses them more skillfully and cautiously. Understanding is not a privilege of the historians. It is everybody's business. In observing the conditions of his environment everybody is a historian.

Everybody uses understanding in dealing with the uncertainty of future events to which he must adjust his own actions. The distinctive reasoning of the speculator is an understanding of the relevance of the various factors determining future events. And ... action necessarily always aims at future and therefore uncertain conditions and this is always speculation.

Acting man looks, as it were, with the eyes of a historian into the future.

Ludwig von Mises
"The Epistemological Problems", S.8
Human Action
A Treatise on Economics  (1949; 3rd edition 1966)
[emphasis added]