SO LET ME TELL YOU WHY I AM EXCITED ABOUT BILL AND TED 3.

This involves speculation based on seeing one (1) trailer... the plot points I am about to address may be something already announced, or may be spoilers to everyone reading this. I don't know. Haven't followed the press. https://twitter.com/nameshiv/status/1288822464064045056

But the storyline I picked up from the trailer is that while Bill and Ted have farted around for decades basically doing nothing despite (because of?) having been told that their music will save the world, it was never actually about them, or isn't any more. (Time travel.)

See, because what the trailer shows us is three things:

1. Bill and Ted, who didn't even bother learning to play their instruments until their first concert, have no clue how to write The Song.
2. The future lady says that history showed "Preston and Logan" wrote The Song.

And while they're still looking for short cuts and cheats, what do we see their daughters doing? Using the time machine to try to put together the actual literal greatest song in history.

Why am I sharing this theory in a thread QTed off something about the Retro Hugos?

Because this is the kind of messaging that I can get excited about in sci-fi: that the future belongs to the future. The future we imagined back in the 80s is not the future, it's the past.

This is the trap that science fiction and its fandom keeps falling into... and also why, while I do love seeing how things like Discovery and the preboot Kelvin timeline series incorporate the old aesthetics, I don't care that new Star Treks make the future's past look better.

I can absolutely get into a good, fun retrofuturist vibe, but that can't be all or even mainly what science fiction is about. If the future we imagine from 2020 looks the same as the future we imagined from the 1960s, the future we COULD imagine then... then we are failing.

When Isaac Asimov wrote The Foundation, it made sense to him that umpty tens or hundreds of thousands of years in the future men would have atomic forcefields to protect their desks from cigar ash and ladies would use atomic paring knives in the kitchen.

If The Foundation TV series has either the rigid gender roles or the luminous obsession with atomic energy, I will not think, "Oh, how wonderfully faithful they are being to the source material."

Keanu Reeves said after Bill & Ted 2, without disdain or rancor, that he was bored of the concept.

I think the third sequel has definitely been a question of "Well, if we find the right story to tell." which is, almost necessarily, a new and different story to tell.

I have written an essay or two in my time on this theme, about the need for science fiction to look to the future. I also went on record that Lovecraft was exactly the opposite of a good mascot for a fantasy award: a man who imagined an infinite universe and *shuddered*.

Lovecraft's viewpoint, being racist and xenophobic, was *provincial*. It was *bounded*. Strange new worlds and new civilizations? NO, THANK YOU. That all sounds a bit "ethnic", doesn't it?

All other things being equal, there would not be a problem with the Retro Hugos existing. A retrospective award for years the award did not exist is not inherently a bad thing. But it has not been used in an imagined or interesting way. It is not being used to tell a good story.

Do we need an award to tell us who the most famous guy writing science fiction and fantasy in a given year was? Do we need to add another spotlight to the laser-like focus we already give The Acknoweldged Greats?

All other things are not equal. The things that win the Retro Hugos might be good, but they're mostly notable now because they were noted then. They are in that most risible state of being famous for being famous.

All of which is to say: looking to the future, imagining the future, inventing the future... these are things which never end.

And I suspect that Bill & Ted Face The Music might do the thing that the best science fiction needs to do.