Geoff Willmetts is currently seriously ill in hospital with bronchial pneumonia, so his usual editorial spot is being filled by Stephen. Anyone wanting to send Geoff their best wishes can do so using the snail-mail below (he's been too sick to get to his e-mail for about 3 weeks now). Please mark the letters 'Get Well Soon' so his mother knows which ones to take to the hospital.

One of the more surreal conversations I had at a bar recently was when someone asked me what I thought should be done to solve Africa's problems.

This being literally the first thing this comrade-in-the-wicked-grape said to me (never having spoken to the fellow before), I was more than momentarily thrown out by their esoteric choice of conversational ice-breakers.

Now, the thing I love most about SF/F are its ideas. Books can become laboratories where imagined societies and technologies can be road tested to destruction in safety. If someone ever invents work-a-day teleportation or immortality, they could do worse than check the classics from the 60s for potential impact points.

Flash riots of gawkers at major disasters as everyone beams down for a look. A world so crowded, with twenty generations of a single family coexisting, that the enormous space of a jail cell and three square meals a day becomes a paradise (an existence refused to any jail bird who dares tell outsiders how sweet life in prison is).

But Africa? Where's the science fiction solutions for Africa? Sure, there's genetically engineered food and nanotechnology. But the problem in Africa doesn't seem to be a technological one - the world's already got cyberspace and mountains of surplus food ... the stuff just never seems to ever get to Africa.

Where it does, it often seems to take the form of massive concrete aid-projects that sit and crumble - dams, hospitals, six lane motorways - airlifted pieces of sci-fi rotting like a rejected transplant. And as Africa is ignored by the world, so it seems to be by science fiction and fantasy, at least as far as optimistic new world views goes.

It might occasionally creep into the genre as a sad extrapolated dump-vision of today blighted existence. As a screwed up battleground, say, in Joe Haldeman's Forever Peace, where the First World is locked in a pointless eternal terrorist war with that of the third (disturbingly prescient after the 11th September).

But there's no Star Trek episodes where the crew land on some super-thriving colony world settled by the wealthy, happy and thriving descendants of Africans. No Tolkien-like fantasies where happy farmers of the mother continent seek magic swords or shields to throw of the curse of darkness from the land.

Maybe because the relentless diet of bad news makes it hard to conceive a utopian future for Africa. Maybe because the only way we can live with the regular litany of misery and images of starving children is to amputate its existence from our imagination.

Maybe because with its civil wars, famine as political weapon, total corruption and misgovernance, the continent resembles some shambling, straight-jacketed lunatic uncle. Determined to suicide.

Locked out of sight & mind, in a sad piss-stained bedlam. Any question 'what can be done to solve Africa's problems' more often slides into ugly arguments over whose fault it all is.

Ex-colonial powers for drawing nonsense borders across tribal nations, then abandoning their charges to army strongmen & local thugs, never having educated a citizenry in governance, science or anything else. African leaders for sucking up aid and wasting it on ego-boosting monuments and gobbing it out into their Swiss bank accounts.

So back to the original question. So surprising. So difficult to answer. What can be done to help Africa? I'm not sure if I have any answers, but for solutions to work, they are going to need to be bottom-up, not top-down.

Where bandits and strongmen rule, they need to be bypassed rather than bribed. Solutions need to be small, viral, hardy and incremental.

No more pork-barrel aid projects - and the U.N. really should embargo arms sales to the continent. Do governments that fail to create an environment where its people are fed or have access to clean drinking water really need another crate of land mines and Steyr assault rifles?

There may be a science fiction future for Africa.

I'm just not sure if mind is equal to the task of imagining it.

Anyone wanting to help should visit The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), the coordinating body which is accepting donations to help ease the current starvation in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Lesotho and Angola.

Stephen Hunt (standing in for Geoff)