“If you want to be truly rational, you can manage without the suitcase,” Krivoshein noted.

Krivoshein — and Savchenko — are far too enamored of humanity to go for that.

Science fiction has been termed a medicine for future shock. Future shock is that sense of disorientation brought about by the rush of invention, the impact of technical events evolving infinitely faster than the bodies and minds of the common man. One wonders if Savchenko has read Alvin Toffler (who invented the term) while realizing that he need not have; the phenomenon and its effects are quite evident to anyone who cares to look. Science fiction writers and their proliferating and increasingly addicted readers are, and have been all along, the people who care to look. They look with practiced eyes, not only at what is and what will be, but at that entrancing infinity of what might be: alternate worlds, alternate cultures and mores, extrapolations of the known, be it space flight, organ transplants, social security, ecological awareness, or any other current, idea, or force in a perpetually moving universe: if this goes on, where will it go? For stasis, and stasis alone, is unnatural and unachievable and has failed every time mankind has been tempted to try it. The very nature of science fiction is to be aware of this and to recognize that the only security lies in dynamic equilibrium, like that of the gull in flight, the planet in orbit, the balanced churning of the galaxies themselves… and of course, the demonstrable fact that the cells of your body and the molecules which compose them are not at all what they were when you picked up this book. The future can shock only those who are wedded to stasis.

(Parenthetically, science fiction writers are not immune to future shock, though it may take the form of an overpowering urge to kick themselves.