That SF has often inspired astrophysicists and theoretical scientists is not something that should come as a surprise. After all, space elevators, while first theorised by the Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, were made famous by Arthur C. Clarke in his 1979 award-winning novel The Fountains of Paradise (And guess what? It is now under serious consideration. A Japanese construction company, Obayashi Corporation, has officially announced its plans for an elevator into space by 2050.)
The Dyson Sphere, which Dyson took inspiration from 1937 SF classic Star Maker, by Olaf Stapledon, is another good example.
(Source: Extreme Tech)
But for some (still unclear to me) reasons, SF influence on social and political sciences is less acknowledged, or studied tout-court.
It was then a pleasant surprise to me when I discovered, very much by pure chance, that ISA (International Studies Association) Annual Conference 2015 – which I’m attending for professional reasons – had a panel with the enticing title: Dystopias And Utopias: Feminist Science Fiction And Global IR (International Relations). Obviously I could not resist the temptation to go and listen, and I was rewarded with these discussion papers:
Parable of the Sower: Octavia Butler and War; Cyberpunk, Masculinist Utopia, And Everyday Insecurity; Drones, Swarms and Becoming‐Insect: Feminist Critiques and Speculative ‘Fictions’; Men in High Castles- The (International) Politics of Speculative Fiction; Revisiting “American SF and the Other”. Duration: 1:45 minutes.
How do I rate this experience: in short, interesting and definitively worth my time. Concepts and considerations expressed in that venue made me think about the necessity of having more of a SF discourse in social sciences, no matter the angle. Any effort in this sense is welcome and encouraged. Said that, I did disagree with almost all the conclusions.
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I’m certainly not an expert of IR “feminist” theories, and I have for sure missed a great deal of what has been discussed by the panelists. Maybe for this reason some of their arguments left me puzzled. Moreover, SF is regarded – and praised – as something “didactic”, or even worse, “politically didactic”, compared to fantasy, which is seen as a sort of “infantile” narrative, no matter if written for YA or not. I’m not a fantasy fan, but I don’t agree at all with this evaluation, without mentioning the fact that no fiction in se is, or should ever be, didactic as an explicit target; not if you’re a (good) artist, at least. As Oscar Wilde rightly said, all art is quite useless. The aim of art is art, period. There’s no doubt that art reflects the period it belongs to, and today we find some poems from Ancient Rome weird when not frankly upsetting. This is anthropologically and sociologically obvious, so to speak, and it’s a worthy exercise trying to understand a civilisation by studying its artistic expressions (I would love doing it with an alien one. Japanese is the closest possible I found to that for a Westerner, and this is why I am such a Nippon-passionate). But if we still read today Euripides’ tragedies or Villon’s poetry is not because they wanted to teach us anything. Euripides wrote to entertain Athenians at theatre, and he had a public to keep happy, not to annoy it with doctrine. And Villon described criminals and thieves in a Paris of Middle Ages: hardly educational, to say the least. The bottom line? If you want to “educate” people, or send a political message, don’t lose your time with fiction: write a (non fiction) book instead, which is more effective anyway. Luckily for SF fans, authors don’t bother with all these things: they write what they would love reading themselves, no matter how outlandish it might sound. And the hell with doctrine too. 
(*Incidentally, and interestingly enough, there was also a session on Games of Thrones and IR, which I was unable to attend. Considering it belonged to the panel of War Studies, however, I found the whole thing a bit disquieting. I hope the way GRRM’s kings & lords treat their adversaries doesn’t represent the future of our global politics, or worse, the new “Foreign Policy 101” textbook for future leaders. Westeros looks a grim place to live, dragons or not).
I second your contention that fiction’s ‘purposes’ is not to be didactic; in fact if it aims to do that then my contention is that it is poor fiction. Fiction with a religious subtext (G K Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, say, or C S Lewis’s Narnia fantasies or his Ransom SF trilogy) don’t work for me on most levels if I don’t care about the characters. If they do have a political subtext (Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four or Animal Farm for example) or a geopolitical angle (The Man in the High Castle for instance) they have meaning for me if primarily they say something profound about the human condition. Picasso’s Guernica refers to a specific atrocity but has a universality that transcends any political statement.
More than that, I find such hijacking of fiction distasteful, philistine certainly, and inevitably wrongheaded. Art for Art’s sake, I say, as indeed you do by quoting Wilde.
I can’t but agree…There are (to me) few exceptions – namely when the artists are so good that even if they try to be didactic, their art prevails. Meyerhold (the Soviet theatre director) comes immediately to my mind when thinking about it. And 1984, what a great book…!!