Book excerpt: American Dream or American Nightmare? Norman Spinrad describes The Star-Spangled Future: "America is something new under the sun. not so much a nation at all as a precog flash of the future of the species . . . I wrote believing that I was simply writing disconnected science fiction stories from whatever came into my head . . . And they all turned out to be about America, the leading edge of all possible futures unfolding around us . . . After all, that was what was coming into my head, that's the mother lode of science fiction realities - the American fusion plasma of which we are creatures - and all we have to do is keep ourselves open to it . . . that's my definition of science fiction. We have seen the future and it is us."