How quickly the future dates

As I mentioned in class, last year's class on Snow Crash was far less enthusiastic than yesterday's. Not that the novel didn't have its defenders way back then, but the dominant view was that what seemed wildly futuristic in the early 1990s was now irredeemably passe. There were also serious problems, some students thought last year, with the cyberpunk genre: perhaps it, too, was passe, or at least aesthetically deficient. Sci fi, or speculative fiction (that obvious attempt to 'legitimise' the genre) has often suffered from the sense that it it might be brimming with ideas it tended to be poorly written, mass market-oriented, nerdyguycentric, and that projections were ridiculously out of whack with what actually happened. All of these have validity, but it strikes me that, in terms of the last criticism, a response could be that speculation should be seen less as prophecy than as heuristic tool, something to get us thinking in new ways. What we do as a result, or where that thinking takes us, is less important than that we are engaging in the process. The future in many ways is in our heads--if it dates quickly, the fault lies in our own imaginative deficiencies. Here endeth the lesson.