Slick take: making speculative fiction count

In this recent syndicated article, columnist Joe Neumaier has some very insightful comments regarding what really clicks with readers...

A couple of direct quotes from Neumaier:
"For a classic pop-culture form often associated with futurethink, smart science fiction has lately felt like an extinct species, as cheesy action stories...But a change is afoot. As evidenced by the critical reaction to the current "Children of Men," serious, intelligent speculative fiction can still pack a wallop (and sometimes attract audiences). Witness last fall's Denzel Washington flick "Deja Vu" and the animated "A Scanner Darkly," TV's political "Battlestar: Galactica" and, in bookstores, Cormac McCarthy's end-of-the-world novel "The Road.""

I can't tell you how many great reviews I've read about McCarthy's book. Speculative fiction works along the lines of the greats like Brave New World, Childhood's End and 1984 are still being written...motivating me and many others to keep striving for our greatest opus.

As Neumaier continues: "For writers, the genre lets you deliberately not quite hit the nail on the head. You can create a whole scenario that has resonance -- and then you watch as it takes on a life of its own." He then takes this thought further to the impact I'm personally targeting when I write: "It's the kind of 'now is then' moral warning that writers from Rod Serling to Philip K. Dick issued regularly with subtle expertise."

Personally, this is my own modus operandi: look at what's going on now and comment on it imagining the future outcome. The trick to this approach is to introduce someone more clever than the operators you see in the public forum today. Imagine if another Benjamin Franklin, Confucius, Leonardo DaVinci or Gandhi type of person appeared in our future world. We could use a good inventor, philosopher or gifted social operator right now. We've got great technologies being shelved, social progress being stymied and a muddled global mindset.

Only speculative fiction lets a person put themselves into today's shoes and wear them in the future. By writing in this vein, we can imagine solutions to today's current world problems by drawing a roadmap to overcome them. Or, in the case many great works of speculative fiction, warn about the pitfalls of inactivity -- making sure people think through the consequences of their current actions and desire to make a change.