Seriously, where’s that damn jetpack? Or the hoverboards from Back to the Future? It’s 2011, people. Isn’t the future here yet?
Yeah, that’s probably how time travellers from the past would feel. Warren Ellis made the same point in Doktor Sleepless, except I found his presentation slightly annoying in its bleeding edge post-cyberpunk atmosphere. You know what I mean, with the technologically-sophisticated rebels fighting against the authoritarian squares. “We may be virtual, but at least we’re authentic,” say the rebels. “Your Star Trek utopias were naive, but we have created the real future.” That kind of talk honestly gets on my nerves sometimes, especially since I couldn’t give less of a crap about something as ridiculous as authenticity.
But hey, remember the 90’s? That was kind of fun. Weird how disjointed that decade feels. It was kind of all over the place, wasn’t it? I guess the West was still groping for a new grand narrative after the end of the Cold War. Thank goodness the War on Terror made a nice punctuation point to the whole period.