Quote of the Week

"Accurate prediction of the future, of its technologies and traumas, has always seemed to me to be the least interesting thing about science fiction. So Arthur C. Clarke predicted the global satellite network -- so what? He also predicted the widespread use of hovercrafts and the dominance by 2001 of the commercial Earth-Moon space trade by Pan Am Airways (d. 1991). Such prescience, or the obligation to display it, is even more than bad writing, it's the element of a work of sf that most readily dooms it -- regardless of whether the predictions turn out to be right or wrong."
- Michael Chabon, "Introduction: Chaykin and Flagg!" in Howard Chaykin's American Flagg!