“I’m sure we would not have had men on the Moon
if it had not been for Wells and Verne
and the people who write about this and made people think about it.
I’m rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts
who became astronauts through reading my books.”
– Arthur C. Clarke
1001 Children's Books 
This is one of those eerily true quotes which describes not only the reader’s fate in the hands of the author, but also the author’s own power to make his stories real, and most of the time he doesn’t know it.