I’ve just started rereading Walter Jon Williams’ City on Fire. It, and Metropolitan, to which City is the sequel, would be close to the top of my list of all-time favorite books in any case; but to read City now — well, I’ll let Mr. Williams explain it.

There are a lot of revolutions and governmental restorations and so on going on in science fiction and fantasy, and it usually ends there. You overthrow the tyranny, or restore the lost king, and then everyone gets married and it’s a happy ending. No one ever has to deal with actually running a country that has been devastated, first by a hideously inefficient tyranny that’s sucking up all the available wealth, and secondly by a civil war. So that’s a lot of City on Fire's concerns, simply coping with what is essentially a Third World economy and trying to vault it over into something better while maintaining a minimum of your political idealism along the way.

[Interview, Nova Express, 1996]

Now what does that remind you of?

Anyone who thinks SF is escapist ought to put down the detective-psychologist mysteries and the 60s Southern coming-of-age stories — and, for God’s sake, the technothrillers, if you want to talk escapism — just for a week, and read these books.