SF Bon Mot

So I read this, and I wrote this, and someone responded with this, so I wrote this:

this is an account of the Future History sub-genre only.

So Brian Aldiss’s Galaxies Like Grains of Sand is not “future history”?

And Sam Delany’s Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia is not “future history”?

And Greg Egan’s Permutation City is not “future history”?

And Ken McLeod’s The Cassini Division is not “future history”?

Interesting… but incorrect. Let’s not kid ourselves, SF is not really about embarassing ourselves by trying to predict the future (that’s why we have futurists), but instead it’s about holding up a metaphorical mirror to contemporary social trends. By choosing to ignore or elide around enormous swathes of left-of-centre polemic and fiction, the US-centric, Gersback/Heinlein influenced “scientification” constructs an ideological homogenization filter that seeks to whitewash the genre while directing social trends concordantly.

In this SF is distinct from many other genres, which seek to influence (whether consciously or unconsciously) current social trends by reflecting on an idealized metaphor of the past, whether recent or distant. SF just flips this mirror around.