Political Science Fiction

Science fiction the way I would define it is fiction that’s set in the future. And so here’s what happens: you set a story in the future and within it embedded either explitily in the text or else implicitly by what happens there’s a history and that history runs from that future moment back to right now. And so one of the things—one of the pleasures of reading science fiction—is that you are deducing the history that got from our moment right now as readers to the world that you are reading about in the text and a text that can give you some surprises or can make things especially clear is one of the satisfactions of reading science fiction. And so a lot of science fiction doesn’t really have very much science in it and that doesn’t disgrace it. It could be the story of how a religious leader from South Korea managed to convince millions to give up their money and turn him into a local dictator figure. That doesn’t have any science in it and yet if it showed that South Korean leader taking over the entire world it would be science fiction, it would be set in the future. That is science fiction as much as any tale of robots or technical innovations

--Kim Stanley Robinson