Younger people may have trouble appreciating this, but I can remember when years like 2001 seemed like way-off times in "the future." I recently read The Puppet Masters, which Heinlein wrote about 1950. He set the story in that mysterious, far-future year 2007, where people use cell phones and display liberal sexual mores, so those aspects didn't challenge my suspension of disbelief. He also seems to have anticipated the security paranoia of the last decade about terrorism. But he didn't get much else right.
However, you have to hand it to the last century's science fiction writers despite their bad calls. They often showed men, mostly, who got off their asses and did stuff in the real world, like building moon colonies, exploring exoplanets, fighting wars with alien races and such. For the most part they didn't anticipate the lassitude and vulgar hedonism which characterizes American life in the real 21st Century.
I've started to wonder lately if science fiction's fondness for neo-feudal social structures, noble houses, monarchies and the like postulated for future societies will seem prescient if it turns out that the democracy bubble has started to collapse in our lifetimes.
Yeah, I can remember when I had trouble believing I was living in the nineties-- surely they were flimsy imaginary years, not years which could be part of the real world.
The Door into Summer is probably the best sf novel for predicting devices, and it's got my favorite piece of general prediction. When the main character wakes up in the future, he doesn't have any way to guess what many of the job descriptions refer to.
I don't know what you mean by vulgar hedonism. To my mind, both the toys and the food have been improving, and I'm glad of it. Low end art ...
This article http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-kessler/why-you-should-be-more-interested-in-mars-than-the-olympics_b_1712462.html -- ok, I admit, I read Slashdot sometimes, no one is perfect ;) -- made me wonder why the awesomeness of space conquest stopped motivating people.
I remember the tales of my parents at the time of the Apollo landing, it was indeed instilling awe and wonder in the minds of people. It was followed by people like the Olympics or the football competitions are. And nowadays, NASA about to send a nuclear-powered rover to Mars, in a very delicate mission requiring the best of human engineering and scientific skills, and not in line in most media, most people not even aware of it? How did we fall that low?
Sure there was the Cold War. It definitely played a role, in the amount of resources invested by both sides in space conquest, and in the way the media broadcasted the news.
But here in France, a country that was mostly neutral during the Cold War (slightly west-aligned, but not part of NATO for most of the Cold War), the interest of people for space was not really partisan. People who were pro-USSR were amazed and cheering for the Appolo mission, people who were pro-USA were amazed and cheering for Gagarin. My brother and I played with (USSR) Sputnik as much as with (USA) space shuttles. We praised equally Neil Armstrong and Yuri Gagarin. I don't think the lack of Cold War explains it all.
So what happened to the space conquest spirit? How did it disappear? I notice a blank spot on my map (well, not totally blank, but still very fuzzy) of reality, do some of you have clues for how to fill it?