Why space scientists need science fiction

THE only science fiction that ever really caught my attention when I was growing up, besides Star Trek and Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, was the novel Contact by Carl Sagan. When I was 15, I saw the 1997 film version of this, which he and his wife Ann Druyan had helped adapt for the screen. Later, as a 17-year-old navigating my first semester at university, I read the book, having accepted that I couldn’t just read Mansfield Park on a loop …