Art & Creativity Quote by John M. Ford

There is a particular kind of grief baked into that last clause: not that the future changed, but that it changed so completely the old imagination no longer has jurisdiction. Ford is talking shop - the abandoned plan for a tidy trilogy, the genre-writer's impulse to map origins and aftermath. Then he undercuts it with a line that lands like a shrug and a verdict: "a different universe". It's funny in the dark way writers get funny when reality steals their best plot.

The intent is practical (he won't write them) but the subtext is cultural whiplash. Early visions of "the Web" often assumed a coherent arc: heroic invention, democratizing network, then some cleaner next stage. Ford, writing from inside the late-20th-century sci-fi brain trust, recognized how quickly that arc collapsed under the actual Web's messy incentives - commercialization, surveillance, platform monopolies, the slow replacement of open protocols with fenced gardens. The "precursor" and "sequel" aren't just unwritten books; they're casualties of a world where the middle book became unrecognizable.

"Different universe" also signals an artist's embarrassment at naive futurism. Ford isn't claiming he was wrong so much as admitting the premises are gone: the emotional texture, the stakes, the moral geometry. A pre-Web origin story now risks mythologizing what turned out to be an accident-prone, institution-shaped phenomenon; a sequel risks feeling like prophecy in a time when tomorrow is written by ad tech, not wonder. It's a sharp admission that science fiction doesn't just predict - it negotiates with the present, and sometimes the present refuses the terms.