What I'm hoping to do though is to ground my extrapolations in specificity, and to make sure that the story I tell is deliberately and honestly told.

No one else noticed, or cared. It was just something they did. Taking other people’s livestock. Other people’s lives. She watched the soldiers, hating them. They were different in so many ways, white and black, yellow and brown, skinny, short, tall, small, but they were all the same. Didn’t matter if they wore finger-bone necklaces, or baby teeth on bracelets, or tattoos on their chests to ward off bullets. In the end, they were all mangled with battle scars and their eyes were all dead.

Nothing so mystical. Human beings hunger for killing, that is all. It only takes a few politicians to stoke division, or a few demagogues encouraging hatred to set your kind upon one another. And then before you know it, you have a whole nation biting on its own tail, going round and round until there is nothing left but the snapping of teeth.

Maybe because we're photosynthesizing we'll do more work outside. So our laptops will have to get rid of these damn glossy screens that have become so popular. And then we'll sit around outside, sucking up sun, getting fat and green, and surfing the net.

But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.

Take three different Thai writers and ask them to extrapolate their county's future, and one hopes that you'll get three very different - but all deeply honest - versions.

The problem with surviving was that you ended up with the ghosts of everyone you’d ever left behind riding on your shoulders.