Having grown up on Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and others, I found this article interesting.
The authors lament the fact that the exciting ideas that came from those authors, ideas about long-distance space exploration, colonies on the moon and mars, etc. are not being realized.
From the article:
“Without taking anything away from the astronauts, the biggest accomplishments of the Discovery mission were that a) it came back; and b) an astronaut pulled bits of cloth out from between tiles.
“Maybe Real Time 2030 will fret about how our college kids do little more than steal full-res holographic porn when they’re not getting their financial identities stolen by cyber-jihadists eager to build more backpack nukes.
“A common theme of those dog-eared, much-loved paperbacks was that the Earth of the future was the dull place, a decadent dead end reserved for the poor, the defective and the luckless. (Think “Blade Runner” with its promise of a new life awaiting you in the off-world colonies.) In fact, we remember flipping ahead irritably to see when the characters’ dull visits to Earth would end and they’d get back on the spaceships where they belonged. It never occurred to us that the parts we wanted to skip would be the only parts we’d get to live.”
It’s a good article.
