Check out this killer reading list associated with a PEN Live talk featuring authors building "authentically diverse worlds." (Save the lecture for your holiday travel.)

We’ve arrived at a future we don’t understand. Can science fiction help us make sense of it?

Darkly, the Hugo Award "Puppygate" scandals, in which an unforeseen voting bloc rallied against diversity in science fiction, presaged the mainstreaming of populist white identity politics. But as the Atlantic put it, "trying to undo change in an increasingly diverse world is futile," so maybe we can learn from it instead.

Science fiction frequently deals with civilizational inflection points. First encounters, for example, which introduce radical alterity, break from the past, and send society into chaos.

An anthologist of Chinese science fiction says that the genre has become so popular in part because China, in two generations, has dealt with incredible flux. "The kinds of technological and social changes that took societies in the West centuries to move through have sometimes been experienced by a mere two generations in China. The anxiety of careening out of balance, of being torn by parts moving too fast and too slow, is felt everywhere."