Gwyneth Jones (1) (1952–)

The suits' leader started to make a standard sort of speech, as far as he could be heard above the hecklers.
"We're going to make England great again," he shouted (against a loud, determined anti-car chant from back in the stacks). "But we need your help, your ideas, your input."
"You mean you need to cut a deal with the Counterculture!"

The government had to make a deal with the so-called Counterculture. The current GM related crop failures, and home-wrecker floods in previously unaffected venues, hadn't improved a situation that was getting rapidly out of hand. The UK's share of the world's weather and food disasters weren't killers (if you wanted to be really scared, look at the multi-drug resistent TB and viral pneumonia deaths!), but they'd brought public morale to the tipping point. It was I told you so time, and the Extreme Greens, the Hardline Counterculturals, whatever they called themselves, were making the most of it, reaping the whirlwind.

Few of us realise how casually our worlds of perception are furnished. A motor car is a motor car. Its identity floats in the sensorium: a means of getting from A to B, a smell of petrol and oil, a large shiny box, a noise in the distance. If all the cars in the world were suddenly present only in so far as they were perceived, the roads would be filled with an army of coloured moving blurs, most of them completely empty under the hood and quite a few with nothing underneath to hold the wheels together. Cars would become like the content-empty ‘futuristic’ props in bad sf. The props of good sf, however, denied the protection of custom and habit, have to be built more soundly than the shadows with which we lazily surround ourselves in real life. The better the writer understands the laborious process of refining an experiment, the more successful the fantastical artefact: a sun that is nothing like the lamp, but it convinces, because the path from one to the other has been rehearsed, intuitively or consciously, every step of the way (and then the steps have been hidden, of course, under a fictional surface).