Seeing Things

Science fiction may be occasionally, if only incidentally, predictive -- as can efforts in any other literary genre. But at its heart, science fiction stands in a creative and critical relation to the present. At its extreme, the misconstrual of science fiction as essentially predictive yields the pseudo-scientific pseudo-policy of the futurological scenario. The stodgy sterility of too much "hard sf" derives from its inept aspiration to be more futurological than literary. That futurological scenarios are then retroactively revealed to be mired in parochial and past prejudices, and predictively accurate in roughly the same proportion that could be accomplished by puppies rolling over keyboards, tends to go unnoticed amidst the next batch of predictions.