What are the dangers of that, if there’s a dominant popular culture from which products are emerging?
If it’s becoming genuinely global, then you don’t have one nation from which the culture’s emerging. Maybe we’ll wind up with just a kind of ubiquitous widespread single culture. But I don’t think about “the future” that way or where anything is going. People will be surprised to hear that. I’ve been saying that from the start. I don’t know what’s going to happen. In our culture, with the position of the science-fiction writer, we’re assumed to do that. When I started writing fiction, my narrative strategy was science fiction. I didn’t feel that my genre was science fiction. I didn’t want to be bound by what genre is and isn’t supposed to do. Do you feel bound by it now, or do you just keep getting questions like that from people like me? Any genre is by definition supremely culture-bound. Science fiction is my native literary culture. It’s totally where I came from. I’m a guy from southwestern Virginia, and I’m a guy from science fiction. But I don’t particularly behave like a guy fro
