There are dates that feel ordinary while we are living through them and only acquire importance later.
September 22, 2026 may be one of those dates for me.
Perhaps nothing remarkable will ultimately be attached to it. Historians may look back on this year and see continuity where, from inside it, I see disruption. That is one of the problems with living through history: the people experiencing an era rarely know exactly what era they are in.
We name historical periods afterward.
Nobody living through the final decades of Rome woke up one morning and announced that the ancient world was ending. Nobody standing in Europe in 1913 knew that an entire political order had only months left to live. The people occupying those moments still went to work, argued with their families, worried about money, planned vacations, and assumed that most of the structures around them would continue more or less indefinitely.
Then they didn't.
I have been thinking about that lately because the world in the fall of 2026 feels strangely unsettled to me.
Not necessarily worse than every age that came before it. Certainly not worse, on its face, than the 1940s. Humanity has lived through world wars, genocides, depressions, pandemics, ideological revolutions, nuclear confrontation, and political systems that collapsed with astonishing speed.
What feels different to me is the number of assumptions that seem to be moving simultaneously.
The political order is shifting. Institutions that once seemed permanent appear less certain. The United States remains enormously powerful, but it is increasingly obvious that the post-Cold War period in which American power appeared almost unchallenged belongs to another moment in history. Whether historians eventually call what follows decline, transition, multipolarity, competition, or something we have not yet named is not something I can know from where I am sitting.
I only know that it feels different.
At the same time, artificial intelligence has arrived with astonishing speed and begun changing something even more fundamental than geopolitics.
It is changing our relationship with reality.
For most of my life, photographs possessed a certain authority. Recordings possessed authority. Video possessed authority. One could certainly lie with any of them, edit them, stage them, remove context, or manipulate the audience, but there was still an assumption that an image represented something that had existed in front of a camera.
That assumption is disappearing.
A photograph can now depict an event that never occurred. A human voice can be reproduced convincingly enough that hearing someone say something no longer necessarily proves that the person said it. Moving images can be manufactured with increasing ease. Text can be generated in industrial quantities by systems capable of imitating almost any tone.
This does not mean that truth has ceased to exist.
It does mean that establishing truth may become considerably harder.
That troubles me more than almost any individual technology.
George Orwell wrote about doublethink as the ability to hold contradictory beliefs and accept both according to political necessity. What concerns me about our present information environment is slightly different but related: people increasingly inhabit information systems in which entirely different versions of reality can coexist. Each group possesses its own sources, its own clips, its own experts, its own interpretations, and increasingly its own artificial evidence.
We have always disagreed over what events meant.
We are approaching a world in which we may first have to disagree over whether the event happened at all.
For a science-fiction writer, this should probably be exciting.
Sometimes it is.
Mostly I find it sobering.
Because I have spent much of my creative life writing about empires.
The First Terran Empire rises, expands, hardens, decays, and eventually collapses. The Prophet's War helps tear apart an existing order. Centuries of fragmentation follow before another civilization begins rebuilding connections between worlds that once belonged to something larger. My Traveller campaigns take place inside regions where ancient political decisions still shape borders a thousand years later.
For years those were abstractions to me.
Historical patterns.
The machinery of space opera.
Lately I have found myself looking at them differently.
Empires probably do not feel like empires to the people living inside them.
They feel like the normal world.
Trade routes exist because they have always existed. The currency works because it worked yesterday. Ships travel safely because someone patrols the lanes. Treaties matter because governments still honor them. Institutions appear permanent because most people alive cannot remember a time before them.
Then something begins changing.
Perhaps slowly.
The patrols become less reliable.
The currency becomes less trusted.
The central government becomes more interested in maintaining its own authority than maintaining the system around it.
Regional powers begin making arrangements among themselves.
Technology shifts the balance between center and frontier.
People stop believing the official story.
None of those things necessarily destroys an empire.
But enough of them happening together may signal that one historical arrangement is giving way to another.
That is where my own worldbuilding suddenly feels less theoretical.
When I write about the collapse of the First Empire, I usually think in centuries.
People do not live in centuries.
They live on Tuesdays.
That may be the most important thing history teaches a novelist.
The enormous transformation is experienced through very small inconveniences at first.
A shipment does not arrive.
A government office no longer answers.
A treaty partner begins hesitating.
A corporation changes suppliers.
A military base closes.
A news report contradicts another news report.
A family begins wondering whether the future they assumed their children would inherit is still going to exist.
The historian eventually draws a line and says that an era ended here.
The people living through it probably did not see the line.
They simply felt that things were becoming uncertain.
That is roughly where I find myself emotionally in September 2026.
I do not know whether the current international system is ending. I do not know whether the United States is entering a long decline, adapting into a different kind of leadership, or simply passing through another period of unusually intense competition. I do not know whether artificial intelligence will ultimately strengthen human knowledge or permanently weaken our confidence in what we see and hear.
Anyone who claims certainty about those questions is probably selling something.
But uncertainty itself is important.
And that uncertainty is beginning to affect the way I think about space opera.
Perhaps I have made my future civilizations too tidy.
Perhaps collapse does not announce itself with burning capitals and enormous fleets. Perhaps it begins with contradiction, institutional fatigue, information nobody trusts, alliances that still exist on paper, and ordinary people attempting to live normal lives while the assumptions beneath those lives slowly change.
That is more interesting to me now.
It is also more human.
The great space-opera empires of fiction often collapse spectacularly because spectacle is fun. Fleets burn. Planets revolt. Emperors fall. Borders disappear.
Real civilization is usually messier.
Some institutions survive.
Some regions barely notice.
Some people prosper.
Some people lose everything.
A new order does not arrive cleanly after the old one leaves. They overlap.
The future grows through the ruins of the present while the present is still arguing that nothing fundamental has changed.
That is exactly the kind of thing I want to explore more deeply in Known Space.
Not merely wars between enormous civilizations, but the uncertainty of people who cannot yet see the historical map the reader may someday see.
A merchant captain does not know that the empire will collapse in thirty years.
He knows that insurance rates increased again.
A colonial governor does not know that historians will someday call her administration one of the last years of imperial authority.
She knows that the next supply convoy is late.
A university professor does not know that the intellectual center of civilization is moving somewhere else.
She knows that funding has been cut.
History becomes enormous only when we step far enough away from it.
Inside history, it is intensely personal.
Perhaps that is what September 22, 2026 is making me think about.
I am sitting in Thailand, writing novels about civilizations thousands of years in the future, running games set among stars that no human being has ever visited, and looking at a world that suddenly seems considerably less permanent than it did when I was younger.
That does not mean I expect catastrophe.
It means I am beginning to appreciate instability.
Civilizations change.
Orders change.
Technologies arrive and alter relationships people assumed were permanent.
The people living through those transitions improvise.
Some make terrible choices.
Some make courageous ones.
Most simply try to get through the week.
That is space opera too.
Maybe it is actually the most important part of space opera.
Spaceships are wonderful. I will never stop loving them. Empires, alien civilizations, lost colonies, great wars, and exploration are the furniture of the genre I have spent most of my life loving.
But underneath all of it is a question that feels increasingly contemporary:
What does a human being do when the world he thought was permanent begins to change?
That question belongs equally to 2026 and 5440.
I suspect I will be writing about it for a long time.
