La fantascianza del futuro prossimo secondo lo scrittore Charlie Stross, uno dei primi autori d’oltreoceano ad aver adottato una licenza Creative Commons per i suoi romanzi. Ripreso da WorldChanging.com, si legge nel testo:

Near-future SF does different things with the same tools; they come front-and-centre — or rather, their effects come front-and-centre, and the world is changed thereby. And they’re not necessarily such obvious new technologies as smart bombs and wrist-watch radios; they might equally well be a new way of looking at the memetic spread of fashions, as in Connie Willis’ Belwether, or social network mediated economics, as in Bruce Sterling’s Maneki Neko.