“If this goes on . . .” is the most predictive of the three, although it doesn’t tryto predict an actual future with all its messy confusion. Instead, “If this goeson . . .” fiction takes an element of life today, something clear and obvious andnormally something troubling, and asks what would happen if that thing, that onething, became bigger, became all-pervasive, changed the way we thought andbehaved.(If this goes on, all communication everywhere will be through textmessages or computers, and direct speech between two people, without a machine,will be outlawed.)