This site has been bugging me for a long time, but this particular post really rubs me the wrong way, mostly because of the titular question that is posed: Why do science fiction writers make stuff up?

The "Manifesto" that is supposedly the underlying the Mundane SF theory says that science fiction ought to stick with the parameters of the current thread of science and where it's progressing (or has progressed). There are a number of other parameters that underlie their theory, too, but the manifesto isn't available online anywhere, so it's hard to really pinpoint what the heck they're talking about.

So . . . why do science fiction writers make stuff up? Well, it is fiction after all, so isn't it all made up anyway? I think the idea that baffles me the most about mundane science fiction is that they feel that the "grandiose ideas of sci-fi writers" will lead to the overuse of resources or the convoluted idea that people will think of science fiction as a truly viable and reasonable future and thus we need not think about the present. It's silly to think that people are really that mind-numbingly dumb to read science fiction as predictions for the future.

So . . . why do science fiction writers make stuff up? Because it's our way of looking at the world and writing our perspective of it. Sticking to the boundaries of current science and current technology really places the story outside of science fiction and puts it into mainstream, science-based fiction. And really, it's a different ballpark from speculative fiction.

I suppose it will continue to be a raging debate, but really it seems like a silly concept.