This article came up the other day, a conversation about whether sf helps shape the future: https://nautil.us/does-science-fiction-shape-the-future-543468/ , and had some interesting thoughts.
Well, except for one that annoyed me: Andy Weir comes off, well, as a lightweight.
Among his comments is “No, it doesn’t, we’re just entertainers.” Perhaps he is – if that’s what you’re writing, then I think of that as a “read in the summer on the beach” novel, and nothing more.
A lot of writers, myself most certainly included, write because we have something to say. In sf, it pretty much comes with the territory. Among the longest running themes of sf is “if this goes on”, which defines social commentary.
Further… what is writing about? A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away… I was working as a library page, and going to college part time. Another page I worked with was a black woman around my age, who had an M.Sc in microbiology (so without a Ph.D, she couldn’t get a job in the field, and was working as a page). One day, she noted I was reading so much of the time when I wasn’t working, and asked what I was reading. I told her “most science fiction”, and she replied, “Fiction. That’s like lies, right?”
I was so shocked it took me three days to come up with a reply, one I’ve been happy with ever since. “No. Lies are saying something you know to be false, and representing it as true. Fiction, though it may tell truths, represents itself to be false.”
That, certainly, describes Becoming Terran. It hasn’t happened yet, but could… and the results would be good for 95% of us.
I turned in the final draft, after the copy editing. Then about a month later, I realized I hadn’t included an acknowledgement. When I asked, I was told it was too late.
What I wanted in that was this: I tried, before my father died, to get him to talk about the future he had fought for, and never got it. Becoming Terran is for my late parents, and for my kids and grandkids. I’ve apologized to them, saying the current cyberpunk dystopia that we live in was not the future I’d intended to leave them. Becoming Terran is for them, and for everyone else (except billionaires), and that’s not “mere entertainment”.