“I often use the metaphor of Perseus and the head of Medusa when I speak of science fiction. Instead of looking into the face of truth, you look over your shoulder into the bronze surface of a reflecting shield. Then you reach back with your sword and cut off the head of Medusa,” said Ray Bradbury in a 1970s interview published in the Paris Review’s Art of Fiction series in 2010 about the ways in which science fiction seems to look into the future, but is in reality a reflection of what has already happened. Write a science fiction story that explores an urgent contemporary issue through the “reflection” of an imagined future. Consider Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which examines the very real issues of book burning and censorship through a firefighter in futuristic dystopia. Think carefully about how you twist a serious subject by placing it in an extreme, far-off premise.
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