Pauline’s Comments (group member since Jan 05, 2016)

Pauline’s comments from the Why do we read and write science fiction? A conversation with Sharman Apt Russell group.

I take a different view of science fiction: I think science fiction is always about the present. When I first read Asimov's _Caves of Steel_ and _The Naked Sun_ as a teenager, I thought, "What interesting world-building." When I went back to them as an adult, I said to myself, "D'oh! They're not strange future worlds at all; they're New York City and the suburbs, exaggerated to the point of satire." Science fiction lets authors take current trends and extrapolate them out at new lengths. Sometimes reality catches up with science fiction, but sometimes the real timeline takes a turn nobody expected (How many SF works written before 1991 confidently predicted what the Soviet Union would be doing a century or two later--expecting it to still exist?). But whether the stories come true or not, in my opinion, the best SF stories remain interesting comments on their own time, or on the general business of being human.