Thinking about retro-futurism, from Steampunk to the chrome-fins of the 50s rocket age, we look at it now with a wry smile because the future didn't turn out like that and it really looks quite quaint.
Now keep moving forwards, 70s and 80s futurism also looks curiously old fashioned or is in the process of becoming so. But wait, what was futurism like in the 90s? What is it now? When will that appear quaint, if it doesn't already, and why?
Of course, what I'm really asking is what futurism looks like today. There's a very few ScciFi authors working on stories set 10-30 years out, mostly quite dystopian. Where's the aggressively optimistic futurism description of how wonderful life is going to be in 2035?
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/World_War_III
Quote: Rising from the ashes of the Eugenics Wars of the mid-1990s, the era of World War III was a period of global conflict on Earth that eventually escalated into a nuclear cataclysm and genocidal war over issues including genetic manipulation and Human genome enhancement. World War III itself ultimately lasted from 2026 through 2053, and resulted in the death of some 600 million Humans.
On the pessimism which contemporary lives engender:
"The Neuromancer trilogy takes place in a vision of 2030 as imagined from the vantage point of 1984 — Gibson explains in this essay collection [Distrust That Particular Flavour] that all science fiction is really about the time it was written — incorporating a reasonably prescient vision of “cyberspace,” a term with whose coinage the author is credited. By 2008, the closest we had got to that future was selling plastic tat to rave kids and getting meaty tourist hands shoved up my cyber-skirt. I routinely found myself wondering: What was the point? Why we were investing so much energy in this fictional future, this increasingly alien world of tech implants and floating cities and exciting angular haircuts, when it’s hard enough to live in the present on $7 an hour? The modern working world had made a joke of the gritty, glittering “cyber” future William Gibson once imagined, and now it was attempting to sell it back to us."
On the deeper level of anxiety which optimism leads to:
"At some point in 2012, we’re going to have to seriously consider the possibility that the world might not end any time soon — that human society might continue, and that we might have some part to play in that trajectory.
And isn’t that the most frightening idea of all?"
-that point about the emotional tranquillity of armageddon could be interestingly developed....
One I saw recently and liked. " The job of SciFi is not to imagine the car. But rather to explore the implications of the traffic jam".
Meanwhile, we should all be able to think about the difference between the state of the world 30 years ago and now. And the potential difference between the world now and what it might be like in 30 years time. So that's 1982 vs 2012 vs 2042. 30 years is right on the cusp of where some development can change the game completely so a future 30 years out should be understandable even though not completely predictable. So for instance, fusion power will still be 30 years out, but GATACA will be a commodity. Just as back in 1982, fusion power was 30 years out but everything was clearly going digital[1] and about to be connected.
30 years is also a human lifespan type period. Even if you can't personally remember 30 years back, you kind of know what the world was like then. If you;re reading this, you have a reasonable chance of personally seeing the world 30 years in the future.
[1]The 80s, the decade that consumer electronics went mainstream.
I think that it is largely to do with the unpredictability of the trajectory of SOCIAL technological development over the next 30 years. Of course, there will be lots of other factors in play here. For example, the visibility of the seeds of the future: even a future populated by Gataca style bio-cyborgs is inevitable, present day biotech is largely confined to the lab, outside the view of the layman. Thus the layman does not so readily imagine one, even if it is easily done, hence the lack of a clear biocyborg aesthetic in popular culture. Whereas, because everyone has seen smartphones do all the clever things they do, lots of people imagine them doing back flips and augmented reality and what not. Maybe there is also something about the increasing trend to invisible technology?
Nevertheless, I maintain that a large part of it is due to the unpredictable political and social times we live in. After all, the emergence of biocyborgs is predicated on biotech researchers getting funding, which is looking a little unpredictable in present times - though the easiest thing to imagine is them not getting any, is it not?
Bio-engineering seems to be one of those techs with unforeseen implications. They'll likely be more prosaic but more far-reaching. Think Monsanto monocultures, health insurance with pre-existing conditions, diesel from algae, child sex choice in the 3rd world rather than bio-cyborgs from California with perfect teeth and unfortunate haircuts.
[edited to add] Gah! I'm sorry. I've made the mistake of thinking the future is American. Again.
Also, I just spent 3 weeks in suburban Houstan Texas. Trust me, panopticon society is upon us.
Finally, if the climate models are even remotely correct, we won't have waterworld by 2030 but there will certainly be more extreme weather, desertification, food/resource shortages and lots of climate refugees and all the political and social implications of that.
But yes, I think most of the implications of biotech which you list are pretty predictable from a present day perspective and agree that, despite them, the everyday life-world of the average westerner will remain qualitatively very similar but for what seem on the surface to be banal alterations (there is something interesting there about our constructing of the life-world so as to make it similar to what we know, hence avoiding 'future nausea').
Nevertheless Hollywood on the whole chooses NOT to explore those implications in any positive or even neutral way. Rather, it provides us - along with most of the rest of our cultural industries - with a deluge of apocalyptic imaginings.
I guess there are two questions here: what will be the world be like? Why are people, on the whole, only given a certain type of answer to that question in the present day? Perhaps it is POSSIBLE to answer the first question non-apocalyptically, but that does not negate the fact that, for the most part, it IS answered in that way.
It fizzled out quite quickly, but it had lots of stuff to say about how death allows one to drop emotional baggage and the analogous process at the societal level...