I started out as a science fiction author back with my first six novels. However, for a while now, my output has been fantasy, be it dark, humorous, or urban. It’s been over ten years since I produced my last SF with the Apotheosis Trilogy.
Why?
The fact is, it’s becoming too hard for me to posit a realistic future. It takes long enough to write a novel, that it’s become more than likely that technology or events will overtake it while I’m writing the damn thing. I’m worried about that with just the contemporary urban fantasy I’m writing now. But, at least with that, I can explicitly set it in 2025 and avoid any anachronisms. (A solution I did with the re-issue of TeeK. Rather than update all the dated references, I just added an explicit date back in the nineties when it was written.) Trying to write in the future, that won’t work.
The pace of change, technologically, politically, culturally, has outstripped my ability to anticipate it. I can’t come up with worlds that feel plausible to me, as I feel that what I’d write would be dated almost as soon as I put words on the page. I find contemporary, fantasy, and historical settings much more comfortable for me now.
Fortunately, I can still read SF without this problem. (Loved the Martian or the Bobiverse for instance.) But, as an example, I look at the current state of AI compared to where it was a year ago, and I find I can’t write an imagined future that overcomes my own personal suspension of disbelief.
Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash
1 Comment
Andrew · August 1, 2025 at 12:06 am
As someone in their 20s who grew up reading your science fiction off my father’s bookshelf this is sad news but understandable. I picked up an old copy of Forests of the Night a couple years ago and was rereading it and was pretty impressed how relevant everything was honestly. Conflict in the Middle East. Stark American poverty, discrimination and unrest. Libertarian independent worlds. Opportunistic politicians. Maybe I’m just getting sentimental but I think science fiction is more of an exploration of the future than a prediction of both what we want to happen and what we are afraid of happening. But maybe your attention to prediction is what made your work so interesting and relevant to begin with.
Comments are closed.