It's James Blish's future . . .

. . . we're just living in it.

I was reading a post at Sadly, No! about Conservapedia's new Conservative Bible Project, in which the creationist fundie homeschoolers at Conservapedia will be "retranslating" the Bible in order to avoid "corruption by liberal bias". I thought the idea sounded familiar at the time, but it's taken me a couple of days to figure out where I heard it before. It's from a short story by James Blish called "At Death's End", first published in the May 1954 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and later incorporated into the first of the Cities in Flight novels, They Shall Have Stars.

The story takes place in the early 21st century. Anne Abbott, a receptionist at a major pharmaceutical company, talks about the Believers, a growing fundamentalist sect:

"And the Believers trust in the literal truth of everything in the Bible -- that's why they revise the book every year."

The further I travel into the future, the more I find that I'm living in some decades-old science fiction story.