(This essay is late because I came home from worldcon with a wonderful prize--COVID19. It was a very mild dose and I'm better now but it put everything on hold for about a week.)
In the past I've blogged about how difficult it is to write the near future, ten years out (I used to have a working recipe); and then more recently about how the error bars on such predictions are getting longer: and most recently about how bad fifties SF is in a feedback loop with the real world, delivering dystopian outcomes through the medium of deeply superficial billionaires and their pet projects. But is that all that's making the near future hard to write about? What if it isn't just the postulated near future, but the readers themselves who I'm writing for, that are changing?
