The Writer found this blog piece in Amor Mundi, a publication of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. What do those of you who write futuristic stories think of this?

“With the 500th birthday of Thomas More’s Utopia in sight, Terry Eagleton considers what it means to dream of a perfect world: “To portray the future in the language of the present may well be to betray it. A truly radical change would defeat the categories we currently have to hand. If we can speak of the future at all, it follows that we are still tied to some extent to the present. This is one reason why Marx, who began his career in contention with the middle-class utopianists, steadfastly refused to engage in future-talk. The most a revolutionary could do was to describe the conditions under which a different sort of future might be possible. To stipulate exactly what it might look like was to try to programme freedom. If Marx was a prophet, it was not because he sought to foresee the future. Prophets–Old Testament ones, at least–aren’t clairvoyants. Rather than gaze into the future, they warn you that unless you feed the hungry and welcome the immigrant, there isn’t going to be one. Or if there is, it will be deeply unpleasant. The real soothsayers are those hired by the big corporations to peer into the entrails of the system and assure their masters that their profits are safe for another 30 years. We live in a world that seeks to extend its sovereignty even over what doesn’t yet exist…”

Read more at www.hannaharendtcenter.org