The best science fiction — and some of the most terrifying science fiction — has a short literary shelf life, because it does not stay fiction for long. In the much-admired HBO series Watchmen, which is set not in a dystopian future but in a reimagined present, the police have begun wearing masks in order to conceal their identities in response to a coordinated massacre of law-enforcement officers carried out by a white-supremacist group. In the real world, the French parliament has just proposed — and withdrawn — a bill that would have criminalized sharing photographs or video of police on the job in certain vaguely defined cases: those in which there is an “obvious intention to do harm,” either physical or psychological.
This is a French story today, but it could well be an American story tomorrow. It is, in part, an American story already.
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