Why we need to fight back against sexy Asian lady robots

We have all come across dystopian visions of a bad future, like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Less familiar is the practice of bad futurism, often hidden inside seemingly compelling stories, which promises an absurd tomorrow based on foolhardy assumptions about the present. It was my pursuit of the latter that brought me to a packed convention hall at the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, UK, in August to watch an all-star panel of authors and critics discussing “techno-Orientalism”. As I discovered, however, this idea goes far beyond fiction; it has…