Sometimes fiction can have a powerful effect on the world of science.  Take for example, the effect of Ringworld.  When Larry Niven first published this science-fiction novel, it was to be a single book, without a sequel.  But the unbelievable response from his readers led him to create Ringworld Engineers. 

But this wasn't just pressure to create a sequel because the public liked the characters so much, or wanted more of a story; this was an overwhelming intellectual response.

Highschool classes sent him projects completed about the "need for a spillpipe system" (vii) based on Ringworld, and Cambridge professors sent him mathematical calculations.  Overwhelmed by the time and energy put into these ten years of responses, Larry Niven decided that he owed the public a sequel.

In his dedication section, Niven clearly points out that it was the real scientific world's response to his fictional creation that made this sequel necessary: "You who did all that work and wrote all those letters: be warned  that this book would not exist without your unsolicited help." (Niven viii)

Niven wasn't the only writer who acknowledged his respect for the scientific community; Frank Herbert also dedicated his first book in the Dune series to the real scientists whose works and findings inspired his writing: "To the people whose labors go beyond ideas into the realm of "real materials" -- to the dry land ecologists, wherever they may be, in whatever time they work, this effort at prediction is dedicated in humility and admiration." (Niven iv)

Thus, imagination and science can be so tied together that they literally perpetuate one other.