Hay Festival: 'Science fiction goes hand in hand with real research', scientist admits Dr Zita Martins, an astrobiologist at Imperial College, London, said the imagination could help fuel scientific research, with fictional books and films helping to point academics in the right direction. If you think about the trip to the moon, 100 years before man went to the moon there was literature describing the trip. Jules Verne actually wrote a book about a trip to the moon. If you compare the first travel to the moon to the book [by Jules Verne], you have lots of common places. It's always hand in hand. In Star Wars, there was the Tatooine planet, rotating around two stars. Recently the Kepler mission discovered a planet like that. It was named Kepler 16b, with the nickname Tatooine. Imagination always inspires scientists to go in a certain direction. She added: "But obviously as scientists there is no place for anything other than reason when were actually reading our data. With data you don't say 'oh what's this, shall we play around with it?' You have to be very rational when analysing data.