The Chaos

We are living in the 21st century which was the future in the sf that I read in the 1960s. Wells' future was aircraft in the 20th century; ours was spacecraft in the 21st. Philip K. Dick surprised us with one short story featuring regular interplanetary travel in the 1990s when space operas were called "captainkirks."

We are living in the Chaos which is the beginning of Poul Anderson's Technic History. What can we expect in our real future history? I do not expect either FTL interstellar travel or First Contact with extraterrestrial intelligences. Hopefully, there will be regular interplanetary travel in this century. Some problems on Earth are urgent. Everyone accepts that unpredictable changes will continue, an idea alien to the minds of most of our ancestors. Many want the world to be different after the pandemic than it was before - as they did during the World Wars.

Yesterday I attended a zoom meeting of just under 300 people discussing the problems of racism, the pandemic and the environment. I texted an acquaintance in London to say that I could see her on my computer screen. We are living in the future and on the threshold of potential futures, many of them dystopian. People need to read sf to understand the present. Wells and Anderson remain relevant.