The experiment in future

SF writers are often said to be predicting the future.  This can be a occupational hazard for hard SF writers, who dream up all sorts of nifty little gadgets and tech that haven't yet been invented.  If they're writing hear-future SF they are in danger of being criticised for the absence of the tech they've invented when the due date arrives and the invention hasn't.

For us softer SF writers, the experiment in future is more about seeing what happens when we extrapolate our current culture and attitudes, or when we free ourselves from them.

SF gives us a blank slate that we can fill with worlds, peoples, and cultures of our own invention.  If we want to explore a particular injustice we can invent a society with rules that highlight that issue.  Maybe  we'll make the situation worse than it is today, so we can get the characters fighting against it, and through them get our views across.

But no matter how much we might want to detach our future world from today, we never can entirely.  We are humans writing about the human condition, and we're a product of our time, conflicts, and cultures.  However aware of these we might be, we can never totally escape our cultural background and family upbringing.

But what we can choose is which experiment in future to run.  Are we dystopian or utopian?  Recently we've had an awful lot of the dystopian kind.  But I've always had a slightly naive hopeful streak.  I was born a rebel.  And when everybody's telling me how bad it is I'm off looking for the green shoots in the wilderness, the "good" people who balance out the evil.  As the Yes song goes "Without Hope, You Cannot Start the Day".

So my experiments in future explore the resilience of the human spirit and heart.  In a brutal world of cyborg armies my people are looking for the chinks in their armour, the fatal flaw that will bring down the dictator and restore democracy.

I don't buy a world where tech controls every aspect of human lives.  Tech breaks down.  And while humans design and service it, short cuts will continue to be made, and it will continue to break down.  We are a gloriously flawed species, and so is our tech and our future.  But those flaws give me the hope to believe that brutal dictators will always be opposed, and tech used to suppress people will go wrong.