He has spotted that lesbianism is chic, but may have miscalculated in his assumption that it's marketable. But the slavering anticipation probably has rather less to do with the show itself than the prospect of the reviews. For example, his snail-stemmed candlesticks and bowls come from restoring candelabras. It takes a huge leap of the imagination to picture any of the critics giving the thumbs-up to a show starring the members, if that's the word, of Fem 2 Fem, the notably talentless "lipstick lesbian" quartet. You have to applaud producer and co-director Michael White's courage. For the new show, set in a Manhattan nightclub, is all about a young girl venturing into the uncharted caverns of her own sexuality, and it's stuffed to the gills with hot sapphic action Apparently.

Besides, it may be that the best way of arriving at tomorrow safely is to properly understand what went wrong yesterday.. All London is in a lather of excitement over Voyeurz, the new "musical revue" that opens at the Whitehall Theatre on Monday. Why, even the Royal Court, that bastion of new writing, has brought forward the start-time of its own Monday-night premiere to allow dedicated critics to hotfoot it to the rival thespian - sorry, lesbian - attractions across town. Science fiction is always a dangerous temptation for newspapers because an imagined future is so much more exciting than the intractable present, with its confusions and uncertainty. As a result, extrapolation - whether it's the terror-struck visions of a BSE-ravaged Britain, which some newspapers carried at the height of the panic, or a more responsible exercises, in social star-gazing - has become a well-established journalistic tool.But there are dangers in elevating the non-existent over dull reality. These days, with kids in the Treasury daydreaming about the next millennium, the sort of imaginative speculation that used to be the preserve of artists and writers has found a place at the heart of politics, so it is hardly surprising that newspapers have followed suit The faster you travel, the more forward visibility you need.

In a passage in his journals, Byron declares his conviction that in the future men will travel by air at unimaginable speeds, a poetic daydream that has its origins not in magic (as it would have done a century or two earlier) but in manufacture. Newspapers have long been in the entertainment business, so it is hardly surprising that they would want to secure for themselves some of the intellectual liberties science fiction enjoys. Besides, it chimes with a peculiarly modern habit of mind - one forced on us by the acceleration in technological change that began with the Industrial Revolution. (Newspapers have not yet conducted any exercises in extra-planetary Hobbitry, the sort of science fiction in which Fetta strokes the lilac pelt of his high- spirited quorn, but it may be only a matter of time.)One doesn't want to be too pious about these excursions into fiction. It delivered much the same delicious, admonitory frisson as the final shot from Planet of the Apes, in which the time-travelling protagonists stare down from a scrubby bluff to see the Statue of Liberty protruding from the sand, and it bore roughly the same relation to the real world. Where Dr Winter's story had been an exercise in utopian science fiction, a vision of new possibilities, the ruined London piece was in the apocalyptic mode.