Humans are terrible at predicting the future. We really overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what we can do in the long term... If we can glimpse even a couple of years into the future, even that's difficult to do.
Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets.
Higher energy costs are unavoidable in all future scenarios.
Our job is not to predict the future. Rather, it's to suggest all the possible futures - so that society can make informed decisions about where we want to go.
Remember, the goal of structured futures thinking is to come up with a picture of possible futures that will help to inform strategic decisions.
Science fiction is the great opportunity to speculate on what could happen. It does give me, as a futurist, scenarios.
I say I write extrapolations. I look at data points and ask what the world could look like.
"Hard" science fiction probes alternative possible futures by means of reasoned extrapolations in much the same way that good historical fiction reconstructs the probable past. Even far-out fantasy can present a significant test of human values exposed to a new environment. Deriving its most cogent ideas from the tension between permanence and change, science fiction combines the diversions of novelty with its pertinent kind of realism.
We need to start imagining the future or it will get imagined for us, and the ways that it has been imagined thus far don't seem very attractive.
I think teens are drawn to these speculative books that portray what might happen and what could happen.
This is actually a very important principle that science is learning about large systems like evolution and that futurists are learning about anticipating human society: just because a future scenario is plausible doesn't mean we can get there from here.
The brightest minds in our field have been trying to find a definition of science fiction for these past seventy years. The short answer is, science fiction stories are given as possible, not necessarily here and now, but somewhere, sometime.
The truth is, as you know, people like us look at what's happening in the world, and then we project it forward. We think, 'If I know A and B, then I've got to know that C and D are coming,' and that's kind of the way it's been with my fiction.
Therefore, no matter how the world makes out in the next few centuries, a large class of readers at least will not be too surprised at anything. They will have been through it all before in fictional form, and will not be too paralyzed with astonishment to try to cope with contingencies as they arise.
One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of the mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
Most of the movies about the future show aliens descending from outer space determined to blow up the world, and somehow they always begin or end with Washington D.C.
What SF can do better than anything else is show us the range of our possible futures, and what we can do to realize the good ones and avoid the nasty ones.
My last book was speculative. I just don't quite know what I am doing. But I'll get there. I have a list of things I would love to write.
