These essays and reviews have been produced over a decade during which the stuff of science fiction became part of everyday life. There have been other decades in recent memory filled with intense excitement about the imaginary future: we can see the marks of their passing in city planning, public architecture, furniture; the streamlining, the monochrome and chrome of everyday objects first admired, then considered hideous, eventually fashionable again. But whether or not we consider the Internet hideous, it is unlikely that telematic networking will be consigned to the lumber room by the next generation, or that biotechnology will come totally undone (despite its mixed performance so far on the money markets); and perhaps equally unlikely that the demographic and economic changes that have created Girl Power, leaving political and idealistic feminism stranded and bewildered on the margins, will be dismantled. Dreams of galactic empire did not come true, the Invaders from Mars (or from any other alien planet in our locality) are consigned to fantasy. But a great deal of the future imagined by my generation's sf writers is actually with us.

William Gibson, the icon of the 1980s, said that science fiction is always about the present. I could argue that it is the only fiction about the present, everything else is historical romance. But at this particular moment in time, reality and science fiction are moving into such close conjunction that science fiction is no longer the strange reflection and artistic elaboration of current preoccupations: the mirror and the actuality have almost become one. Moreover, most of the routes to a new separation (aside from the colourful fantasies of the ‘science fiction’ entertainment business) might involve losses considerably more painful than saying goodbye to the Venusian Swamps and the ancient cities of Mars. Perhaps we should hope for some kind of catastrophic fusion of future and present, the End of History as pronounced by Baudrillard: but postponed, from hour to hour, from sentence to sentence, by this narrative that never reaches closure. We should remember that though there are tragic science fictions, science fiction itself is a comedy.