So I was reading this post on
Charlie Stross' blog today. He mentioned a lot of interesting things, but I'm going to run with one that wasn't at all the point of the article:
The near future is a particularly dangerous time to write about, if you're an SF writer: if you get it wrong, people will mock you mercilessly when you get there.
I've never really seen it that way. Near-future SF (or really, any fiction set in the future) assumes a possible future and then tells a story there. If reality catches up with the date of the story, all that means is that what was once a story of a possible future is now a story of an alternate history.
The book
1984 is set in a 1984 where the UK had fallen into a totalitarian regime. We're 25 years past that now; is the book deserving of mockery because the events didn't happen? Of course not; today you can read it as an alternate history that branched off from reality in 1949 when the book was published.
Similarly, we're closing in on 2015, the year in which
Back to the Future II was set. It's looking pretty unlikely that we'll have hoverboards and flying cars by then, but there have been great advances in other areas of tech that didn't appear in the movie. (Future McFly got unceremoniously fired via fax; in the real 2015 it would probably be by email.) Should we mock the movie? Well, yes, but not because it didn't correctly predict which research fields would be successful.
