Deconstructing the Starships
Liverpool University Press
Science, Fiction and Reality

"These essays and reviews have been produced over a decade during which the stuff of science fiction became the stuff of everyday life. There have been other decades filled with intense excitement about the imaginary future. We can see the marks of their passing in city planning, public architecture, furniture: the streamlining, the monochrome and chrome of everyday objects first admired, then considered hideous, eventually fashionable again. But whether or not we consider the Internet hideous, it is unlikely that telematic networking will be consigned to the lumber room of possibilities unachieved, or that biotechnology will come totally undone, despite a mixed performance so far on the money markets; perhaps equally unlikely that the demographic and economic changes which have created Girl Power, leaving political and idealist feminism bewildered on the margins,will be dismantled. Dreams of galactic empire did not come true, the Invaders from Mars, or any other alien planet in our locality, are consigned to fantasy. But a great deal of the future imagined by my generation's sf writers is actually with us."
Deconstructing the Starships, Introduction, 1999

to put it another way, the cyberpunk writers (circa 1984-1995) said: in the near future, Digital technology will get incredibly, fantastically much better, and everything else will get much, MUCH worse
& they were dead right.

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