Charlie Jane Anders

Every science fiction writer has a story about a time when the future arrived too soon.

I have a lot of those stories.

Like, OK, for example, years ago, I was writing a story where the government starts using drones to kill people.

I thought that this was a really intense, futuristic idea, but by the time the story was published, the government was already using drones to kill people.

Our world is changing so fast, and there's a kind of accelerating feedback loop where technological change and social change feed on each other.

When I was a kid in the 1980s, we knew what the future was going to look like.

It was going to be some version of Judge Dredd or Blade Runner.

It was going to be neon megacities and flying vehicles.

But now nobody knows what the world is going to look like, even in just a couple of years.

And there's so many scary apparitions lurking on the horizon, from climate catastrophe to authoritarianism.

Everybody is obsessed with apocalypses, even though the world ends all the time and we keep going.

don't be afraid to think about the future, to dream about the future, to write about the future.

I found it really liberating and fun to do that.

It's a way of vaccinating yourself against the worst possible case of future shock.

It's also a source of empowerment, because you cannot prepare for something that you haven't already visualized.

But there's something that you need to know.

You don't predict the future.

You imagine the future.

So as a science fiction writer, whose stories often take place years or even centuries from now, I found that people are really hungry for visions of the future that are both colorful and lived in,

But I found that research on its own is not enough to get me there.