*I'm paraphrasing his remarks from a web livestream, which is pretty
much a departure in itself, and rather backs up his radical assertions here.
*From the "Thrilling Wonder Stories" architecture-fiction event
http://stream.aaschool.ac.uk/index.php
Ian R. MacLeod's Eight Problems in Writing Fiction About the Future
1. Future not dominated by Western culture and its archaic Western concepts of "futurity"
2. Future subjects of fiction not "people" as we know human beings today
3. Space travel not what we once imagined, and faster-than-light travel flatly impossible
4. Science becoming arcane and ultraspecialized, while the nature of reality may well be beyond any human/scientific comprehension
5. "Alien life forms" likely unrecognizable, may not exist at all, or may be among us already, just not understood as alien
6. Basic technical infrastructure of a future society incomprehensible to us
7. Radical language drift makes future indescribable within present-day literature
8. We may have no future due to human/planetary mass extinction
