The triumph of these pieces was their brilliant, self-consistent evocation of a credible future.
The triumph of these pieces was their brilliant, self-consistent evocation of a credible future. It is hard to overestimate the difficulty of this effort, which is one that many SF writers have been ducking for years. This intellectual failing accounts for the ominous proliferation of postapocalypse stories, sword-and-sorcery fantasies, and those everpresent space operas in which galactic empires slip conveniently back into barbarism. All these subgenres are products of the writers’ urgent necessity to avoid tangling with a realistic future.
