was first published in 1975. So, as of this e-publication in 2013, it’s been around for nearly forty years. It’s middle-aged. Sf isn’t supposed to be middle-aged. It’s supposed to be youthful — the new, the cutting edge — bringing us the future. Very little of my sf is predictive. It isn’t about how things will be in the future. I’d rather write about ways we might go that are different from the way we’ve been going all my life. ‘The future’ in my sf is mostly just a metaphor for a different way to a different place. The way we’ve been going all my life is, put very crudely: increasing dominance of corporate capitalism dependent on economic growth; geometrical increase of human population; and (as a result of both) unceasing and increasing abuse of the environment. These days, growth capitalism has few critics and no real alternatives. The terrific rate of population growth is usually reported as a neutral statistic — 2 billion in 1930, 6 billion in 2000, 10 billion by 2050 . . . .
