Adjectives modify nouns, adverbs modify verbs, advertisers modify the truth.She only had faith in empirical data, in experimental results.

“Good luck-and God protect.” I was sure that little reference to God was for the sake of the network cameras.189Įnd of an Era (1994) All page numbers are from the mass market paperback edition published by Ace ISBN 4-9 Note that the chapters in the book are numbered in reverse order Introduction to You See But You Do Not Observe, originally published in Nebula Awards 31, p.It embodies, perhaps more clearly than anything else I've written, the central theme of all my work: namely, that clearheaded, unflinching, rational thinking is the only effective way to deal with reality.His latest novel, Rollback, looks at the bioethics of life prolongation. Sawyer is a futurist, consultant and author, one of only seven writers in history to win all three of the world's top awards for best science-fiction novel of the year: the Hugo, for Hominids the Nebula, for The Terminal Experiment and the John W. A science-fiction writer's job is to go further, placing all that in societal context: What will the changes coming down the pike actually mean to lives of ordinary people at work, at home, at play. But real science fiction-not Star Wars escapism, but thoughtful works that reasonably extrapolate not just technological but also social trends-does more than just project cold data forward. I'm a huge advocate that science-fiction writers make the best futurists: A futurist on his or her own is good at extrapolating statistical trends and telling you what the population size might be in a given year, or how big the economy will be. A futurist's goal is usually to predict the future, but a science-fiction writer's goal is often to prevent the future, by depicting a plausible but undesirable scenario with enough credibility that society decides to make a course-correction. I'm both a science-fiction writer and a futurist, which are related but distinct disciplines. We assume the rest of humanity is like us: forward-thinking, rational and enamored of science. (even though I did predict fraud using electronic voting machines in my first novel, 1990's Golden Fleece). But, anyway, for me the answer to both is essentially the same: Like so many science-fiction writers and futurists, I predicted a rational 21st century, a new millennium in which old superstitions and fundamentalist religion would have faded into the background-and so I was shocked by the rise to the heights of power of the religious right in the U.S.

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