In addition to my usual saturday morning fiction writing, I got the gears rolling this morning with the beginning of an essay slated for TealArt in a few weeks. I got off on a little tangent, which will show up in the footnotes, but I wanted to reprint it here, because I rather like it. So here we go.
The essay is about trends and memes in science fiction, but the bit I’m posting here is about futurism.
Cory rehashes some of these ideas about futurism here, but I think on the whole, science fiction isn’t really about the future, and never has been. “True” to current understandings of science, or not, science fiction is always both future oriented (looking forward) and about the present. If you’re a contemporary setting using contemporary technology, or in a near future setting, using “accurate” technology, or if you’re writing a story ten thousand years in the future using wildly futuristic technology, it’s all to a certain measure irrelevant, and even more importantly, it’s all made up anyway.