Verne is a fairly strong example. He was reasonably popular in his time, so he didn't become famous only because of correlation-in-hindsight. We might ask whether he's an outlier or just the tail of the bell curve, but I strongly suspect that what actually happened was that later engineers were consciously influenced by his fictional designs, much like with William Gibson and the modern Internet.

This suggests that fiction-future correlation is largely determined by technical plausibility, which in turn suggests that we may be able to predict in advance whi... (read more)