I’m starting to feel like politicians want my job. Judging by the current debate about whether or not Britain should stay in the European Union, they’re all into speculative fiction. Both sides have come out with apocalyptic predictions about our near future. If they’d been written by Bruce Sterling or Kim Stanley Robinson I might even take them seriously – those guys know how to make plausible predictions based on economics, sociology, and the hard sciences. Nigel Farage, not so much.
I have strong opinions on this issue, but they aren’t based on amateur sf predictions, they’re based on my ideals and what I think we should value as human beings. Watching politicians cry havoc and let slip the dogs of alarmism just makes me mad.
So as a professional speculative writer I beg you, don’t listen when politicians dabble in science fiction. Listen to their values, by all means. Pay attention to their CVs. Watch to see if their actions and their words match. But don’t let them predict the future for you – they never know what they’re talking about.