Most writers of contemporary sf credit Vernor Vinge with introducing an important and compelling idea. They also seem to share his unease over the extrapolative and narrative entanglements it implies. Charles Stross, a prominent voice in the new generation of writers grappling openly with these problems in their work, describes the Singularity thesis as ‘this enormous turd that Vernor Vinge crapped into the punchbowl of sf writing, and now nobody wanting to take a drink can ignore it.’ Since the mid-1990s Stross and many of his peers – including comparatively recent arrivals such as Cory Doctorow, Neal Stephenson, Greg Egan, Ken MacLeod, and Peter F. Hamilton, alongside Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, and other alumni of the cyberpunk school – have been at work on the problem. While they readily embrace the premise, these writers by and large reject Vinge's feeble supposition that, in order to write intelligibly and intelligently about the Singularity, ‘you have to be there.’ Implicitly, and usually with a satirical wink and a half-apologetic shrug of self-awareness, they acknowledge the logical paradox in order to explode it, moving on with the business of writing through the Singularity, rather than around it. What else can be done? As Stross says, ‘there are some turds so big you either have to ignore them entirely, or spread them around and use them as fertiliser.’

While more recent efforts to write authentically postsingularity fiction testify forcefully that the reports of sf's imminent death are at the least exaggerated, it may well be true that the Vingean crisis marks the end of a particular science-fictional mode: the kind of straightforward, logical-positivist predictioneering that Vinge privileges as ‘honest’ extrapolation. It may no longer be possible to write, with a straight face, earnest Asimovian tales that make concrete and verifiable claims about real future events, except on a hyperlocalized scale and within a drastically limited scope. The genre, then, has little alternative but to seek out new and more sophisticated angles of approach to an ever-nearer and ever-more problematic future.