Shrinking The Future

Science fictions writers
are the fortune tellers
of the technological age.

Male SF writers were weak and macho.
Like storytellers down the ages,
they recycled the old expectations
to reassure lazy audiences,
as they borrowed from macho pasts
that palled and paled with each variation.

Since 1945 the best new SF writers
were women who created a new sexual politics
to predict our changing reactions
as our dependence on new technology
undid the oldest binaries of gender roles.

Women writers explored where men shut down
the degree to which technology makes us all data
to be dissected by choices in human nature,
where we had to admit that we did not know
the character of the lead we were all following.

In this ontological race to shrink ourselves
by becoming aware of ourselves as cogs
in ever bigger machines, our only choice
of future is to choose when to stop, ourselves,
and stop all futures in favour of the present.....