A View From The Future

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Thinking back over the heatwave that we've experienced here in the British Isles for the past week or so, while our friends across the Atlantic face the terrors of the polar vortex, I wonder if there's a future perspective to take into account in telling our science fiction tales.
It seems that our children and grandchildren might tell stories of the golden age when their ancestors experienced the turning of the year in a series of well-ordered seasons. That there was a time to plant, a time to grow, a time to harvest and a time to rest.
It certainly looks like climate change has scrambled that pattern as we experience the two hottest days in February ever, one after the other. Looking out of the window, I see a strange summer day, as warm as most that we experience in Scotland, except that there are no leaves, no heavy verdant foliage; a skeleton of summer.
Something is changing and we need to take that into account. New stories of the future should not refer to the gentle seasons, except in retrospect; unless we have a story about the development of weather control. See Asimov's great city planet Trantor, with its weather machines for a good example.


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