“Increasingly, this sense of technosocial aspiration meshing with the limits and desires of concrete social life (…) is the appropriate response to contemporary reality.

Consider the daily news: the postmodern hecatomb of the World Trade Center; Chernobyl’s lost villages and mutant flora; CGI pop stars; genocide under surveillance satellites; the cloning of farm animals; Internet pornography raining down in microwaves; helicopter gunships deployed against stone-throwing crowds; GM pollen drifting toward the calyces of natural plants; Artifical Life; global social movements (and even nations) without territories; the ability to alter one’s physical gender; the evaporation of the North Pole.

It is sf that has most assiduously imagined and explored such collisions and transitions. It is from sf’s thesaurus of images that we draw many of our metaphors and models for understanding our technologized world, and it is as sf that many of our impressions of technology-aided desire and technology-riven anxiety are processed back into works of the imagination. It is impossible to map the extent to which the perception of contemporary reality requires and encourages science-fictional orientations.”

— Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), pp. 2-3.