On April 14th, The Guardian published a piece entitled “The Big Idea: Will Sci-Fi End Up Destroying the World?”—a headline so riddled with passive deflection and intellectual laziness that it’s almost impressive in its audacity. In it, writer Sam Freedman attempts to draw a line between the speculative fiction of the last half-century and the exploitative ambitions of Silicon Valley’s most power-hungry moguls. It’s not just a weak argument—it’s a dangerous one.
Let’s be clear: this article is yet another installment in a growing catalog of media that fails to hold power accountable. Instead of turning the lens on those actively shaping the world into a cyberpunk dystopia—tech billionaires gutting privacy laws, undermining democracy, commodifying human interaction, and fast-tracking ecological collapse—it turns its ire on science fiction and fantasy. The very genres that warned us about them in the first place.
According to Freedman, we’re meant to believe that works by Iain M. Banks, Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, and others are to blame because certain wealthy men misunderstood, misread, or deliberately misused them. That’s not critique. That’s deflection. It’s giving bad actors a narrative loophole. Worse, it’s a subtle form of cultural gaslighting—reframing cautionary tales as the seeds of destruction, rather than as sirens trying to steer us away from the rocks.
Cyberpunk has never been a celebration of dystopia. It’s a genre rooted in resistance. It exists to expose the rot beneath the chrome, to show what happens when unchecked power, corporatized governance, and technological fetishism replace empathy and justice. Speculative fiction, more broadly, has provided society with its most incisive critiques of authoritarianism, technocracy, and late capitalism. These stories are not manifestos for conquest; they are warnings—deeply moral, often tragic, and fundamentally human.
To blame these stories for the actions of those in power is to mistake a fire alarm for the fire.
Elon Musk naming drone ships after Banks’ Culture novels doesn’t mean Banks endorsed Musk’s worldview. Zuckerberg building a shallow, dystopic version of the metaverse doesn’t make Snow Crash complicit. And Peter Thiel using names from The Lord of the Rings for surveillance tech companies doesn’t mean Tolkien advocated for digital authoritarianism. These aren’t acts of homage—they’re acts of appropriation, using the surface aesthetics of speculative fiction to lend cultural weight and legitimacy to corporate agendas. It’s branding. It’s marketing. It’s misdirection.
And The Guardian, knowingly or not, just handed them a fresh piece of cover.
The reality is that poor reading skills, unchecked ego, and the instinctive greed of tech elites are not the fault of literature. These are human failings, not authorial ones. We are not witnessing the consequences of too much fiction—we are witnessing the result of too little critical thinking, too little ethical regulation, and too much power concentrated in the hands of people who confuse metaphor for instruction manual.
Speculative fiction remains one of our greatest weapons for confronting corruption and injustice. It shows us what could go wrong, long before it happens. And for many readers, it’s the first glimpse of how resistance might begin.
Instead of scapegoating writers, perhaps we should examine why so many of their worst-case scenarios are coming true.
It’s not because they imagined it.
It’s because the rest of us didn’t listen.
