Sounds like post-modernism, or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last...

Sounds like post-modernism, or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last... I agree the future isn't what it used to be. I think it's that technology fundamentally changed our social structure, and while it was assimilating the technology, it created a gap, an unknown, that we could escape to, and which might answer perennial questions about being a human, for better or worse. But now we've assimilated it, so that gap is no more. Perhaps we'll get science fiction again, when next we develop a technology that fundamentally changes the structure of society. Continuously improving communication wouldn't do it; that's one of the things we've assimilated. Don't know what it would be, but perhaps a way of looking for it would be to examine our social structures, and ask what changes it copes well with, and what it wouldn't. ie. hack society.