Hypothesis Thursdays: (r)

What is mistaken for a crisis in the speculative fiction of extrapolation and prediction is actually often confined to speculative fiction's power of naming. Again and again, speculative fiction is confronted with its fantasies becoming reality, bearing names different to those under which it fantasised them.

What is worse, the new and real names -- which are not only a little different, but completely separate, with neither grateful allusions nor anxiety of influence -- are frequently the proprietary trademarks of companies, or originate as the slang of subcultures, collectives which can only appear in their correlative speculative fiction traditions as a bathetic viral toxins, utterly lethal to all the most enduring assumptions and aspirations of those traditions, and to their mechanisms of subsistence and aggrandizement.

Earlier: names in SFF #1.

UPDATE: Elsewhere: Normalcy is the Future.