SCI-FI

Dear science fiction authors of the past,

You got the future all wrong.

Sure, we have gadgets,

but we are at their whim, not they at ours.

The projections used to save the world

instead provide a means of eating away the day,

and the high-tech walkie talkies they imagined

replace the now-antiquities of conversation and play.

Those old enough to overlap from a long-gone generation

preach warning of progress as their grandparents preached to them...

It is well known that we are averse to change:

The camera made art too easy / the factory disrupted agrarian life.

(Who knows what elder cavemen thought of fire, perhaps a cause of strife.)

But what if it’s different now,

and the grandparents are presently right;

and the consequences hold more consequence than bad business for painters or some cities

and smog.

As our apathy grows in tandem with our dependence,

this looks like a realization of sci-fi-gone-wrong

and I can’t resist it either.