The shimmer here between the necessity of imagined tomorrows and control of the too-quickly-arriving tomorrow is the space of the kind of creativity signaled by prefigurative political practice. Delany repeatedly emphasizes the sense in which, as he writes:

Science fiction is not “about the future.” Science fiction is in dialogue with the present. We SF writers often say that science fiction prepares people to think about the real future—but that’s because it relates to the real present in the particular way it does; and that relation is neither one of prediction nor one of prophecy. It is one of dialogic, contestatory, agonistic creativity. In science fiction the future is only a writerly convention that allows the SF writer to indulge in a significant distortion of the present that sets up a rich and complex dialogue with the reader’s here and now. (176)

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 226)