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They're catching up to me.

In 1949, I wrote my first science fiction novel. Its plot was so outlandish that no publisher would buy it.

The story was based on the supposition that the Soviet Union places satellites and people into space before the United States does. To catch up, the U.S. launches a crash program that puts Americans on the moon before the Russians can get there.

Publishers regarded the plot as ludicrous. And maybe, since it was my first novel, it wasn't written all that well, either.

The point is that real events caught up with that 1949 novel. The Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite into Earth orbit in 1957. In 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to fly in space. In 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon.

It took 20 years for the real world to catch up with my fiction. Now, nearly 60 years and 112 books later, it seems that it takes only a couple of weeks after I've published a novel for the world's scientists to turn my fiction into reality.

Either I'm slowing down or they're getting faster.

Of course, there are lots of scientists and engineers working in various fields of high technology. Whole armies of them, around the world. I'm just one writer. And I type with only two fingers, at that.

Case in point. In 1996, my novel "Moonrise" included the idea that water would be found on the moon.

Current astronomical wisdom said that the moon was utterly dry. Six Apollo missions to the moon had brought back hundreds of pounds of lunar rocks for scientists to study. They were completely anhydrous: not a molecule of water in them.

Yet there were scientists who speculated that water might exist on the moon in the form of ice. They reasoned that comets — which consist mainly of frozen water — have been crashing into the moon for billions of years. Some of them may have hit inside deep craters where sunlight never reaches. On the airless surface of the moon, shadowed areas are extremely cold: a hundred below zero or colder.

So it might be possible for pockets of water ice to exist on the moon as ice inside craters that never see sunlight. Such craters exist at the moon's north and south poles.

That's what I put into my novel "Moonrise." I don't invent the backgrounds of my novels out of whole cloth: I use the best scientific information I can get.

While most scientists believed there was no water on the moon, I decided to go with the maverick few who thought otherwise.

And they were right. Within a few weeks of the publication of "Moonrise," the Department of Defense announced that its spacecraft Clementine had detected deposits of water ice in deep craters near the moon's south pole.

I was elated. But worried. It only took a few weeks for reality to catch up with my novel.

Back in 1989 my novel "Cyberbooks" predicted the advent of electronic books: handheld devices with high-definition screens that could display pages of books. Within minutes, it seemed, the electronics industry was putting "e-book" readers on the market.

My "Cyberbook" was a lot better than their cumbersome, clunky e-books.

Of course, all I had to do was describe it in words. I didn't have to make the gadget actually work. Still, I could maintain that e-books were a far cry from my "invention."

Well, all that might be a thing of the past. Sony has just announced a new "Sony Reader" that they've developed in league with E Ink, a technology firm in Cambridge, Mass. It is the size and heft of a paperback book, and its screen is bright, clear, and high-definition.

It sounds exactly like my Cyberbook. And a good thing, too.

One of the reasons I'm in favor of true electronic book publishing is that electronic books should become very inexpensive. For years, I've watched the price of books rise almost out of sight, as costs of paper and ink escalate steadily.

Electrons are cheaper. At least seventy-five percent of a publisher's costs arise from schlepping tons of paper from paper mills to printing presses to distributors' warehouses to bookstores. Moving electrons instead of paper should bring down the price of books to the point where anyone can afford them.

I look forward to that day.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about schemes to weaken hurricanes or steer them away from land. Back in 1967 I wrote a novel titled "The Weathermakers," which dealt with exactly that problem.

How do you prevent hurricanes from striking populated areas, killing hundreds of people and causing billions of dollars worth of damage?

In "The Weathermakers," I proposed a scheme that uses brute force and clever timing.

Hurricanes begin as tropical disturbances out over warm ocean waters. The center of such disturbances is a rising column of warm air, which eventually becomes the eye of a full-grown hurricane.

In my fiction, I had squadrons of B-52 bombers drop tons of liquid nitrogen into those rising columns of warm air. The liquid nitrogen, at close to 300 degrees below zero, cools the disturbance's central core. The disturbance dissipates. No hurricane forms.

That was fiction. Would it work in the real world? I don't know.

How much heat has to be dissipated in order to break up a tropical disturbance? Would a squadron-load of liquid nitrogen be enough to do the trick? Maybe several missions would be necessary.

The cost would be trivial compared to the damage that a Katrina or a Wilma can do. But what would the long-term effects of stifling hurricanes be? As the old television ad used to say, "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature."

Would our weather system hurt us in other ways if we prevent hurricanes from forming?

Hmm. That might be a good idea for a new novel!

Naples resident Ben Bova is the author of 112 books. His latest novel is "Mercury," part of his acclaimed Grand Tour series.