I apologize upfront because I do not recall where this title originated.  I generally try and attribute any and all quotes and phrases from other sources when I am able to do so,  but this time I have nothing.   It does not mean that the words are mine,  but more likely it is a paraphrase from a conversation I have heard. 

Science Fiction, at least in the United States, has generally been a balance between imagined future and a political statement about the present.  The writers in this genre have, with varying levels of both success and controversy, attempted to use Foreign places and unfamiliar people/aliens as a means to address issues such as Racism,  Fascism and Agism.   Vonnegut imagined a slow motion sort of dystopia in Player Piano, his story about workers displaced by robotic factories.   I don't think he wrote the book honestly thinking all people would become expendable,  but he did have a sense that Large Businesses everywhere would embrace any means to make more and more products spending less capital by using less and less people.      Does that mean Vonnegut could read the future?  Oh heck no, but he and other writers certainly read their Present and made stories built on their interpretations of what they saw,  as opposed to what they were told. 

What do today's writers see- what is their present?    Does this pandemic or our current pandemic mean all new Science Fiction will be colored by social isolation?   Will our  financial turmoil change how they see the future? 

One of the pleasures of good (insert subjective value judgement here) fiction, is its ability to present the Failures of our fathers and grandfathers in a detached- nonjudgmental way-   a "They didn't know any better"  sort of narrative.    Hindsight might be 20/20,  but it need not be vindictive and caustic.    The number of people who were sure the Titanic would sink is unknown,  but it was probably less than the number of lifeboats they had.  

So from this point forward I would suggest almost all writers are now Science Fiction writers.  Writing about anything in the next ten years and not acknowledging how science and medicine is now intertwined with our daily lives would not only be disingenuous, it would assume that their readers don't expect it.   I think that would be incorrect.  

 

Let's move foward with stories that embrace what is known and not known- that speculates, of course, but also interprets our future based on what he have seen before and what we see now.    I think the phrase I would use is Science Present.    That should be compelling enough.

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