There is a particular science fiction approach to the world, and it has nothing to do with the future. It doesn’t have to be in the future at all. I used to read anthologies of science fiction stories when I was a kid — there’d be ten stories about rocket ships and ray guns, and then there’d be some strange Robert Bloch story set in some town in the 1950s that had no science, no traditional SF content, but it was clearly science fiction. It had that SF approach: an awareness that things could have been different, that this is one of many possible worlds; that if you came to this world from
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