One of the most obvious facts about the entire science-fiction genre is that its ideas, presuppositions, assumptions, and more rest on an analysis, not of the future, but of the present conditions projected forward into a fantastic future.

Which is why both dystopian science fiction (Blade Runner, most notably) and utopian science fiction (anything written by Isaac Asimov) miss the mark in describing the future we all now live in, from their perspective in the mid-20th century.

The unremarked upon challenge for science fiction writers in our time is that we need stories about the future of our present era, with its cell phones, social media, surveillance and data tracking, rising large-language models, and skepticism and mistrust of institutions and authority figures. Oh, and rockets from Elon, Bezos, and Lockheed Martin.

But we can’t get those stories–just as we can’t get tragic stories, just more reporting on tragic circumstances–because writers and artists today lack the creative vision to imagine the future and project forward, from this point today into an unknown future, in the way that Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and William Gibson did.

And those guys had typewriters, railroads, rocket missions to the Moon, and computers that still ran on reel-to-reel tape.

We don’t need more narrative rehashes of classic science fiction describing the world we live in now. We need narrative imagination describing and providing a narrative structure for the “gee-whiz” world to come.