intricately and intriguingly woven, lots of fun, and extremely thought provoking.

It's easy to imagine ways the future can be ugly and depressing. It's harder, but more worthwhile, to imagine plausible ways we can make it better.

Ideally, I'd like every issue to include a diverse group of stories that meet the qualifications sketched above, but covering a wide range of specific matter and flavour.

And, of course, some SF is set close enough to here and now that Anglo and European do apply. Since many of the writers come from those backgrounds, so does much of the fiction.

I think the rising and falling popularity of areas like hard SF and far-future SF is, to a considerable extent, the same as any other fashion.

intricately and intriguingly woven, lots of fun, and extremely thought provoking.

What SF can do better than anything else is show us the range of our possible futures, and what we can do to realize the good ones and avoid the nasty ones.