EDITORIAL

Ghettos are insular places. The antics of ghetto elders or sinister youth gangs may assume absurd importance to a degraded and indigent populace. In their wretched haste to eke out a living, they may forget that the outside world exists.

This is modern SF's predicament. Extrapolations, that once held some intellectual validity, have now become distorted folk tales, passed down through generations. SF's vision of the future has become a Punch and Judy show, ritualized, predictable, and fit only for children.

This is not due to latter-day decadence. It is the result of a profound terror of the future and what it holds, a fin-de-millenaire obsession with apocalypse. Reader and author alike wrap themselves in escapist nonsense, quilted up from rags and tatters of jingoist imperial Americana or the comfortable minutiae of technical obsession.

Yet this represents a profound abdication of SF's role in society. It is as if the scouts of a panic-stricken army had retreated to an obscure corner of camp.

Attempts to actually go out and survey the territory are dismissed out of hand: too difficult, too dangerous, too depressing. Too much hard work. It's easier to exploit the panic: either by addiong to it with the latest gray dystopia, or by preying on the terror of a demoralized readership by offering cathartic power fantasies.

To survive and revitalize itself, SF must find new visions of the human future. Never mind that 40-year-old crap about atomic armageddon. If we can't see any farther than that, then we will have added to the apathy and fatalism that are the allies of destruction.

Think of it as an act of self-preservation. In the case of any profound disruption of society, our snug little ghetto will be the first to go. It's up to us to look for ways out. If not us, who?

As a first step in this daunting and worthy task, CHEAP TRUTH offers the following guideposts in the wilderness.