The Purpose of Science Fiction

22 Apr 2008

Sometimes, when I am writing, I worry about how accurate my depiction of technology will be, but I have recently come around to the point of view that it doesn’t matter all that much, so long as it is internally consistent and has a compelling story/characters. This is because only one of Science Fiction’s jobs is to deal with the future. Another is to take situations that we see today and look at them in a different light, from different perspectives, stripped of all the glit that is placed on them by tradition, the media, and society in general.

One of the reasons that I’m bringing this up is that I’m currently working on my Uprising project, which is the first science fiction that I’ve written in a while (having mostly been focusing on fantasy). I’m sure that the majority of my predictions will either go too far or not far enough, but I’m not writing simply to try and guess what the future might look like, I’m writing with the hope that readers will be able to positively affect that future.