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Science fiction, it seems to me, is like a mirror — a distorting mirror, admittedly, yet one which like all mirrors reflects what is set before it: our hopes and fears, our aspirations and our doubts.

Although, ostensibly, it deals with the future, when I am writing I am always conscious of the fact that I am thinking in the present and by the time my reader sees what I have written it will belong to his past. Already, in the twenty years or so I’ve been writing SF, I have seen many, many of my imaginary futures overtaken by events, so that they belong neither to the future nor to the past, but to a limbo of unrealisable possibilities.

John Brunner