There's a short but interesting editorial by Jason Pontin in MIT's Technology Review. It talks about the influence science fiction has on technologists. Among observations of the usual predictions of science fiction, such as space travel and geostationary communications satellites, the article notes that "older computer scientists and electrical engineers such as Marvin Minsky and Seymour Cray, born in the mid-1920s, pursued a vision of humanlike artificial intelligence and mainframe computing popularized by science fiction after World War II".