Sometimes life is like in Bladerunner. Here I am sitting at a coin-op public network access terminal in a bus station, waiting for my bus to Seoul. I realized that, considering I need to deal with the jerks at the Jeonju Immigration Office, I should probably go pick up my ticket and passport today so that I can get the work on my Re-Entry visa processed before Wednesday. I’ve heard that they purposefully dely things until the last possible day, just out of spite, and I have an appointment in Seoul on Wednesday, so I need to be able to go to the office tomorrow so that I can reasonably demand the paperwork be done for Tuesday or at the latest Wednesday morning.

Anyway, sitting here at the public access terminal feels somehow futuristic. I wonder if that’s a kind of sign of future shock, my feeling that something I am actually living in the middle of feels futuristic to me. How much more bewildering will the next ten years be for me, when I face things that I never read about in SF novels but which will be happening to us all? I suppose it’s my job as an aspiring SF-writer to be churning out the ideas that will prepare us for that&#151p;I even argued that in an essay on this site (but have no time to link to it for now)… but I am beginning to wonder what will happen when the boundary between SF and realism begins to dissolve. Hmmmmmmmmmm.

Something to think about on the bus…