We now have all come throughout dystopian visions of a nasty future, like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Story. Much less acquainted is the apply of dangerous futurism, usually hidden inside seemingly compelling tales, which guarantees an absurd tomorrow based mostly on foolhardy assumptions in regards to the current. It was my pursuit of the latter that introduced me to a packed conference corridor on the World Science Fiction Conference in Glasgow, UK, in August to look at an all-star panel of authors and critics discussing “techno-Orientalism”. As I found, nonetheless, this concept goes far past fiction; it has…