Putting paid to the chestnut that science fiction writers aren’t really trying to predict the future in their novels, Robert J. Sawyer writes to tell us of this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics. In this blog post, he tells us that his 1999 novel FlashForward predicted not only the name of the current Pope (Benedict XVI), but two of the three winners of this year’s Nobel Prize: Saul Perlmutter and Brian P. Schmidt, “for their work showing that the universe will expand forever.” Perlmutter and Schmidt share the award with Adam G. Riess, who didn’t make an appearance in the novel.