To ask if science fiction can save the world is to waste time asking a question when none is necessary – the hypothesis has already been formulated, the results already documented. To ask the question is to ignore the world science fiction has already saved – and the awful years we’ve already lived through. When one claims that Star Trek (and other science fiction) is a reflection of our rosier past, as Hamish Wood does in ‘Can science fiction save the world?’, we must respond, whose past?