William Gibson: SF Writers are Screw-Ups

...when it comes to making real predictions anyway. He makes the excellent point that we remember only the successes, but we don't compare that number against the overall denominator of all predictions. Most of which are goofy and wrong. SF is great because it allows us to bring an additional element of literature into play (setting) instead of just accepting it as a given, thus considering counterfactuals and asking questions that we would not be able to otherwise. But as fiction, it's always a mirror of the people writing and reading it, and the time and place they live.