Cory Doctorow discusses it on Locus Online.
From the piece...
Science fiction writers are pretty useless as fortune-tellers, but who needs fortune-tellers? ‘‘Prediction’’ implies a future that we hurtle towards on rails, prisoners of destiny. Having a route-map for the railroad is nice, but wouldn’t it be better if we could steer?
So what do science fiction writers do when they ‘‘predict?’’ Well, as I’ve already discussed, they inspire. You’d be hard pressed to find an aerospace engineer or roboticist or computer scientist or theoretical physicist or biochemist who isn’t a science fiction fan. The ways that we write about the possible futures (or impossible ones) get civilians all het up about those possibilities. Sometimes, they go out and make them real. Neal Stephenson tells me that during the dot-com heyday, new hires at high-tech startups were handed a copy of Snow Crash and told, ‘‘Read that, it’s our business plan. You start Monday.’’ I think there’s a nice little contrafactual story idea lurking in there about someone who turns up the following Monday with a Babylonian mind-virus pre-coded and ready to seed over the Web. Science fiction writers also inoculate. The dystopian tale isn’t just attractive because of its recurring fantasy of competent men starting over in a world wiped clean of old sins and sinful institution; it’s also a way for our collective imagination to seize hold of the potential for technology choices to harm us and the things we care about.
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