”As a teenager I read a great deal of SF. Without realising it at the time, I was learning a grammar of futures imagery that subverted the usual default view of the future as a blank space and instead populated it with an immense variety of images, meanings and possibilities. Because of this variety, my relationship to the future became active, rather than passive. For example, I began to wonder why so many fictional futures were populated by cruel aliens, implacably menacing super computers, rampaging robots and earthly catastrophes. Why, I wondered, could the future not be a desirable place, even in imagination?”
