The Sci-Fi Blueprint: How Yesterday's Fiction Built Tomorrow's Technology

Donald S. Porter is a technology historian, writer, and speaker specializing in the relationship between speculative fiction and technological innovation. His work has appeared in *Wired*, *IEEE Spectrum*, *The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists*, and *MIT Technology Review*, where he writes the regular column "Prediction and Reality." He is the author of three previous books: *The Difference Engine: Computing Before the Computer Age*, *Faster Tomorrow: A History of Speed in Technology*, and *Signals and Noise: The Untold Story of Radio's First Century*. His writing has been recognized with the American Society of Journalists and Authors Award for Excellence in Technology Writing and a finalist citation for the Eugene S. Ferguson Prize for outstanding scholarship in the history of technology.

Porter holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an M.A. in the History of Science and Technology from the University of Oxford, where his thesis examined the influence of Jules Verne on early twentieth-century rocketry. He has lectured at the Smithsonian Institution's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, the World Science Festival, and the Singularity University Executive Program. He has also served as a consultant to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago on the development of its "Future Technologies" exhibition.

Before turning to full-time writing, Porter spent a decade as a software engineer at Bell Labs and later at Microsoft Research, where he worked on early natural language processing systems. He credits this background with giving him a practical understanding of how technologies actually move from concept to product—a perspective that distinguishes his writing from purely academic accounts. He describes himself as "an engineer who fell in love with the stories engineers tell themselves about what they are building."

Porter lives in Evanston, Illinois, with his family. He is currently at work on a book about the history of prediction itself, from oracles to algorithms, tentatively titled *The Future Industry*. He speaks regularly at universities and conferences, and he maintains an active presence online at donaldsporter.com and on Twitter/X at @donsporter, where he discusses new research and invites reader contributions to his ongoing work on technology prediction.