Verne and Wells hooked me early.  Journey to the Center of the Earth and The Time Machine provided wonderful escapes for a ten year old boy.  I read them for the adventure, for the sight of worlds not ours. Eventually I caught on.  Entertaining adventures, yes, but something else lurked in those books.  Antedeluvian monsters lived not only at the center of the earth, but at the center.   The two societies (or races or classes) of The Time Machine, each in slavery to the other, emerge from only a slight distortion of the present.   We write about what we know.

Science fiction (or sf or sci fi or science fantasy or … - I’ll avoid that debate) provided not only a ripping good yarn but a place to stand and look back.  The morphing of the present into a future or parallel world encourages a critique of the present from an imagined perspective.  Whether utopia or dystopia, the tension between there and then and here and now opens eyes.

Certainly 1984 and Brave New World accomplished that, the former positing a future of brutal repression along the lines of Communist societies, the latter invoking the future of soft repression not very distant from certain advancing capitalist societies.   Think soma as country club or “Call of Duty WM3”.  (Had Orwell written today we would have been treated to a whole other range of slogans: “Happiness is a Mall”; “Desire Deferred Is Slavery”; “Freedom is Shopping”; “Peace is Eternal War”; “Knowledge is Elitism”).  The choice is whether to be taken care of by a man with a gun or by a man selling drugs.  And the winner is … both.

Futures have become marvelously complex, including near future dystopias and far future galactic societies for whom earth has been lost to myth.   Whichever, the tale reflects on, looks back to, you and me.

Religion once provided such a perspective.   At once in the future and a kind of parallel present, the Kingdom of God called believers to reflect on their lives and societies.  But the Kingdom of God became limited to the perfection of eternal life. Comparing the present with post-death perfection left little room for hope or story.   Those who seek perfection on earth have become the evil protagonists of science fiction.

I write for the same reasons I read: to see what happens and to learn.