The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction

by Neil Gaiman

A few years ago, in 2007, I went to China for the first-ever, I believe, state-sponsored science fiction convention, and at some point I remember talking to a party official who was there and I said, “Up until now I have read in Locus that your lot disapprove of science fiction and you disapprove of science fiction conventions and these things have not been considerably encouraged. What’s changed? Why did you permit this thing? Why are we here?” And he said, “Oh, you know for years we’ve been making wonderful things. We make your iPods. We make phones. We make them better than anybody else, but we don’t come up with any of these ideas. You bring us things and then we make them. So we went on a tour of America talking to people at Microsoft, at Google, at Apple, and we asked them a lot of questions about themselves, just the people working there. And we discovered that they all read science fiction when they were teenagers. So we think maybe it’s a good thing.”