Fandom has resounded for almost a decade with the hullabaloo and the shouting, and now the hollow shell of a structure stopped suddenly in headlong growth sounds to nothing but a painful silence, sterile on the shores of a lost world. If such is your purpose, you are a pack of fools, content to sit smugly by while the fine talents inherent in your brains, the brains which provided the spark which sent science fiction leaping to a halted youth, stagnate. Because, gentlemen, the world is catching up with you and will pass you by. The outlook is there, the brains are there. Naturally all types of fiction are idealized versions of situations found in everyday life.
Science fiction is an idealized type of vision of the life of the future.
Science fiction has to do something about it because its very life is bound up with the future and today practical events are working to shape the outline of that future in bold, sharp relief. As idealists, as visionaries, we cannot retreat before this challenge. We must accept it and carry the battle into the enemy's camp. Hitherto, this challenge has not even been recognized, much less accepted. So come out of your secure cubbyholes of clubrooms and laboratories and meeting places and look at the world before you.