I love this quote from Howard Lovy’s Nanobot. If I understand correctly,it’s a paraphrase of a statement by Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT:
“This is the assumption I wake up with every day — that there is a crucial need for as many people as possible to understand that we all, in our lifetimes, will experience vast technological changes that will forever alter the way we interact with our environment, with one another and with our own bodies. It will not be too long before we rub our eyes, look around and wonder what happened to the world in which we were born.”
Sometimes I want to shake people around me and say things like this. And even more often I want to shake mainstream authors or critics who disparage science fiction as somehow being unconcerned with the “real world.” You know what? The real world is being rewritten, reorganized, rebuilt, reformatted, all the time, by scientific and technological change.
And that’s what makes science fiction, the good stuff, important–it’s an inoculation against future shock, a warning that, as I wrote myself in a column a couple of weeks ago, the future is always zooming toward us.
And you know what? It’s picking up speed.
