Because if you think about it, there are a lot of stories that we could tell about the future. The ones we choose, and how we tell them, are the product of our present.

I think we forget that at our peril.

(And I got my daughter an Internet Puppy No Can Haz Noms T-shirt for her 10th birthday. She adores it. One generation’s deadly insult is the next generations adorabz meme.)

I think many of the authors on my shelves pushed boundaries and challenged assumptions when they were younger. The books on my shelves are the product of that phase in their lives. But once they had the Boundary-Pusher and Assumption-Challenger badges, they kind of…froze in place (at best; some clearly veered toward the batty). But the culture and the community have moved on past them now, to the next set of boundaries and assumptions. They don’t have the tenure they thought they did.

(Mind you, some of them have been that…off the whole time. But those books aren’t on my shelves.)

I’d hasten to add that their hardening of the intellectual arteries is not inevitable. They have contemporaries who have continued to grow and change as the culture has. It’s not an age thing, just a rigidity thing.

Masami Akita, aka Merzbow, is prominently left-leaning and supports many environmental and ecological causes, but I’m loathe to buy any of his records where he mentions PETA on the sleeve because of the severe ethical reservations I have about that organization’s practices.

And one of the reasons I grew increasingly dismayed with the recent crop of SF and fantasy authors was how many of them turned out to be such reactionary twerps.

Ted Nugent is a more extreme example. I would guess that the vast bulk of his current audience are there because he’s a racist, sexist asshole. He’s never been particularly influential or groudbreaking as a musician, so his art is easy to live without.