I noticed this with cyberpunk stuff, too. The genre has been incredibly prophetic. It just sucks that it’s all the stupidly bad shit and not a single one of the super cool sci-fi things.
I read this comment on the toilet using a pocket-sized computer that everyone I know owns, and we’re all addicted to.
Nobody’s buzzing around in flying cars, but if they were, they’d be so ubiquitous we’d just say “meh, we should have jetpacks by now.”
I do agree with you that we’re getting all the Bad Stuff though.
This is very true. I use iSH on my phone to run python scripts and ssh into servers, I use Working Copy to make git commits from the toilet or my bed. Like for all intents and purposes, my phone is a cyberpunk “deck,” but I suppose cyberpunk is literally named “The Dark Future” for a reason, considering all else that is going on.
Is it prophetic, or do we just have a techno-capitalist elite that looked as those books as a roadmap rather than a cautionary tale?
Oh yeah. You know after World War III it’s not going to be warp engines that get invented.
But we might have neutrino (?) bombs; those theoretical bombs that can just vaporize people and leave buildings and infrastructure intact.
The problems lie in the “punk” part. Just like cyberpunk’s prophetic bad stuff isn’t the cyber. Pretty sure solarpunk is still about the societal issues existing in what could be a utopia if they didn’t. Wealth inequality, bigotry, etc. You’re just not polluting the planet because everything is green.
Um, no. It’s the very opposite of that. Solarpunk addresses inequality and bigotry directly.
