It's most presumptuous to believe we already know all the answers and will never get any more big surprises.

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.

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.

Its limitations are those of the physical universe: it won't let you play with some really wild ideas that aren't possible, but are fun to speculate about.

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.

When something hasn't been around much for a while, and one example of it turns up and catches people's eyes, they go looking for more like it - until they get tired of it again.

It's most presumptuous to believe we already know all the answers and will never get any more big surprises.